


A Minor Battlefield

by whereismygarden



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - College/University, Intrigue, M/M, Mathematics, Mentions of alcoholism, mentions of depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-03-02 19:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 35,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2823206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whereismygarden/pseuds/whereismygarden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post injury, post divorce, Everett Young ends up in California, in San Francisco, in a lecture hall with Dr. Nicholas Rush.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will be a short, somewhat fluffy (where fluffy=nonviolent, for this pairing) AU story. Chapter lengths will vary, but won't get too long.

                Young’s leg was killing him; he’d forgotten the intolerable distances involved in walking from campus parking to relevant buildings. The artificial joint that was now his right knee had only fixed some of the damage: the hip was inoperable, and that pain radiated up his spine. The cane that Lam had required he walk with had an ergonomic grip and a section that fit around his upper arm. It was bulky, and he hated using it, but it was necessary.

               

                The sun was gentle this morning, and he was glad of it: his backpack, which he had packed perhaps too much into, was heavy, and proceeding into one of these air-conditioned buildings after working up a sweat was an unpleasant prospect.

               

                The lecture hall he was headed to was on the first floor: a relief after struggling up the steps into the building. The hills of San Francisco were hell on his leg. He sank into a seat on the edge of the back row, stretched his leg out, and extracted a blank notebook from his backpack. He was ten minutes early for lecture, but it gave him time to swallow a painkiller and eat a powerbar. After ten years of eating the things, they were the easiest to consume fast, without thinking about it.

               

                The other students started trickling in about two minutes before class started, all chattering and comparing notes on summer, the class, and the lecturer, who turned out to be a slight man with glasses and longish hair. He arrived at exactly 10:10, set a box of chalk on the bench, clicked on the projector connected to the computer in front of him, and folded his arms. The buzz in the room died down to the clicking and uncapping of pens.

                “This is Discrete Math, I’m Dr. Rush.” Young blinked in surprise at the man’s heavy accent. “We have a TA this semester, Mr. Eli Wallace. Not sure how much help he’ll be, being a computer scientist, but he probably knows more about discrete maths than any of you.” He pointed to a young man with curly brown hair, wearing a shirt with some text printed on the front. He didn’t seem bothered by Dr. Rush’s dismissal of his knowledge, and waved a hand vaguely at the room. “The syllabus is posted online. I’m going to start with a quick overview of the formal logic we’ll be using. Next week we’ll move into set theory.” He turned to the board, apparently done with the introduction. “I expect all your proofs to be intelligible, if not correct.”

 

                Over ten years of sitting through SGC briefings had made Young an excellent note taker and listener, even if this was a little more—well, a lot more—difficult in terms of material. Dr. Rush was intelligible through his accent, and though his old major, back in '93, had been in applied physics, the methodology of proof writing came back. Based on the ‘simple’ examples Rush was giving, once they got into content, things would be harder, but this was not bad.

               

                He folded his notebook closed after fifty minutes, putting it back into his bag and letting the more able-bodied students flow out of the classroom ahead of him. The TA had struck up a conversation with some of them, and they were already deep into a discussion of software when Young managed to get his backpack onto his back and take his cane.

                Dr. Rush was coming up the steps just as he was walking out. The man raised his eyebrows at Young and slowed his rapid ascent of the hall stairs.

               

                “I was wondering what the hell someone was doing sitting all the way back there,” he said. Young detected neither pity nor sympathy in his voice, and was glad. He didn’t say anything. “You’re not a typical student of mine.”

               

                “I’m part-time,” Young said.

 

                “Yes well,” Dr. Rush said, narrowing his eyes. “I won’t be cutting you any slack for that. This isn’t a class for dilettantes.”

 

                “Right,” Young said tightly, and smiled a little. It was his reflex when angry or insulted, a way to keep calm. Cam always gave him shit for it and said it made him look like a crazy man. Dr. Rush didn’t seem fazed. “I’ll keep that in mind.” The other man didn’t say anything further, just continued out the door at a fast pace. Young couldn’t help but glare after him.

               

                He didn’t have time to dwell on the affront, however, because his other class was meeting in fifteen minutes. It was only two buildings over, but at his slow pace, he needed the time. Cursing the Lucian Alliance with every step, he made it to the second floor of the physics building with a minute to spare. Signing up for a seminar class on new papers in a field he already knew would, in theory, take up less time than discrete math.

 

                His BS in physics had been over two decades ago, yes, and he hadn’t needed to do as much calculus as your average Air Force officer, but there had been a few times it had come in handy. It was soothing to know he could understand how engineers had determined the capabilities of his F-302, even if he didn’t actually ever run the numbers himself.

 

                The class was filled up with mostly seniors taking physics majors: he knew, because this professor insisted everyone in the small class introduce themselves. There was one student, a girl with a long black ponytail, who said that she was in Air Force ROTC. Young suppressed a smile: Renee Kim (double major, physics and computer science) sat ramrod straight in her chair, and her notebook, already labeled for the class, had pencil and highlighter both tucked inside. He wondered, as he always did whenever he saw a USAF uniform or heard the name these days, if Cheyenne Mountain would snap her up.

 

                Young’s small apartment ten miles from campus was spare. He’d left Emily most of their things, and much of the rest had been too much trouble to move from Colorado Springs and been distributed to friends. It had a working washer and dryer, the books he’d kept, a bed, and a table to work at. He probably shouldn’t drink at two in the afternoon on a Monday, but he opened a beer as soon as he got home anyway.

 

                Then he settled down with his new textbook and the seminar paper, determined to spend as much time as possible on both. He had an unread text from David on his phone, but he carefully put off reading it until after seven, when he gave up trying to convince himself that the can of soup he was heating needed his close attention.

 

                > _Everett: hit up that bar just off the bay. RD swears by the microbrews there._

 

                Nothing else. He appreciated David’s ability to completely ignore the emotional aspects of any situation, and he _didn’t_ want to talk about this situation, but he also didn’t want to go out. He drank the soup and another beer, didn’t reply to the text, and reread the paper and the first chapter of his textbook. He could already tell that tomorrow would have him feeling as though he couldn’t get out of bed, and with no class to force him, it might actually happen.

 

                Young showered, brushed his hair, and went to bed early. He hated retirement, he hated the omnipresent pain of his back and leg, he hated his lonely apartment, and he hated himself. So far, the only things he had that he didn’t despise were Discrete Math and Topics in Physics.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoy this new chapter! Merry Christmas, and if Christmas isn't your thing, have a good day nonetheless.

                “You look tired.” Young pushed his hair back: he still shaved every morning, but his hair was growing out of its regulation cut. He found he liked having it longer.

 

                “I’m fine, Eli.” He _was_ tired: no matter how much he slept, he just got more tired every day. He knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t have enough to do. There was only so much time he could spend doing proofs before he started to feel incompetent at those, too. Eli waved his hand, a pen flying out of his fingers and clattering to the floor in front of the whiteboard. He simply pulled another out of his pocket and continued checking the sheet of proofs in front of him.

 

                “You should go out. I was actually going to suggest a few other people from this section come out with me, but most of them are actually under twenty-one. I know, it’s crazy right? Makes you feel old.” Young shrugged. He didn’t mind the recitation sections. Eli was in charge of them, and spent them giving out help with abandon, drinking Coke despite the rule against soft drinks in the computer labs, and answering questions for everyone who was also taking a computer science. He was also the sole purveyor of face-to-face civil conversation Young had outside of his physics seminar.

 

                David called often enough, and they talked about things like sports, the new buildings at Peterson, and the scientist at NORAD David was apparently trying to charm into bed. But David never had free time for longer than a half hour, and those conversations were always constructed, he knew, to make him feel less lonely. It sort of worked, some of the time. Eli was actually better at that, because he wasn’t doing it with intent.

 

                “You’re not a typical teacher,” Young said. Eli snorted.

 

                “Oh please. I intend to go for a Mister Miyagi meets Yoda vibe, but not until I’m in my sixties at least.” He crushed his Coke can and pitched it unerringly into the recycling bin. “Anyway, my girlfriend and I usually hang out at the bar two blocks down from this building. There’s a good mix of students and non-students out there, it wouldn’t be weird or anything if you came.”

 

                “Sure,” Young said. He had lost some of his ease in talking with people, lately, and didn’t have much to say to Eli. It was okay though, because Eli always had something to say to him.

 

                He was thinking of enrolling full-time next semester, if this one turned out well. Getting a real degree would be more work: enough work to keep him busy. His neighbor had offered him a job on weekends, once he found out Young was a veteran, grilling steaks at his bar, which he was trying to turn into a place for food. That and more classes would help stave off the despair that was always waiting to grab him, sink its claws into his heart, keep him prone and empty.

 

                Dr. Rush’s class was something of an odd respite for Young. The students in the physics seminar treated him with a certain amount of deference, since he already had a degree, and that professor was bemused by his presence more than anything else. Eli was still young enough to see Young as a “grownup,” and so were the students in Discrete Math. Dr. Rush, however, didn’t seem to give a damn.

 

                When his lettering had become more complicated, Young had started sitting further down, close enough to be in range of Dr. Rush’s questions. He was something like a sniper, Young thought, firing off his questions to unsuspecting students. Young only managed about half his mid-lecture questions about the basics of set theory, and thought privately that Rush was a bit of a jerk. He would answer questions, but if asked to repeat something, he got visibly irritated about it. He never stayed after lecture to answer questions, though Young had seen some students manage to catch him while he turned off the projector. He wasn’t a bad professor, and he explained things well, but he was far from eager to help or encourage.

 

                Young definitely preferred to _talk_ to Eli, who seemed to write proofs effortlessly, and switched between coding for his thesis and playing something on his laptop with bizarre fluidity. Still, he occasionally had to deal with his actual professor, and the class session after their first exhausting test, Rush handed tests back by hand. Young, taking far longer than the other students to descend the stairs, was the last person. Eli was texting as he slowly climbed up the stairs, and gave Young a nod and smile.

 

                Rush handed him his exam with what managed to be an aggressive gesture, adding in an upraised eyebrow. Young took it as calmly as possibly: an “88” was scrawled in the upper right corner, and on the pages of proofs, his mistakes were marked out in red. He folded the paper up and stuck it into his jacket, not wanting to take off his backpack and go through the often agonizing process of putting it back on.

 

                “The second test is generally considered a lot more difficult,” Dr. Rush said, still giving him a challenging look. Young wasn’t sure if that was the man’s normal state or if he just disliked Young, but it was annoying either way.

 

                “Oh yeah?” he said conversationally, adjusting his cane for something to do with his hands. “Did I score lowest in the class, or did you say that to everyone?”

 

                “No and yes,” Rush said curtly, pulling a sheaf of notes out of his bag and burying his nose in them. Then he was stalking up the steps at high speed, far ahead of Young.

 

                So, he was either an asshole or had no idea how aggressive he sounded. Young would put money on both, with a side of _didn’t care_. He shook his head and started back up the stairs. He was trying hard to not judge assholes on their initial behavior; it was how he had met some of his best friends.

 

                To his surprise, Rush was still standing outside the lecture hall, paused a few feet from the door. He was writing in his stack of papers, one booted foot angled to the side and head bent. It reminded Young sharply of what some of the SGC scientists used to do: forget to eat, forget where they were. There was a small group of students queueing for the next class, bunching up near the door. No doubt they were hesitant to brush past a professor who was clearly occupied.

 

                “Doctor Rush,” Young said. “Excuse me.” He had no such qualms, being long past fear of university faculty and experienced in prodding heads-in-the-clouds scientists back down to earth. Rush looked up at the students, who were all but visibly cowering, and moved farther away from the door, giving Young a slight nod.

 

                “You do that a lot?” Young asked, smiling at him. He had twenty or thirty stories involving similar situations, of which at least one he could probably share to a civilian with no clearance. Rush gave him a guarded look, shoving his papers back into his bag and tucking the pencil back into the pocket of his white dress shirt. Young wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the man wear anything else.

 

                “I’m not sure,” he said, and oddly, he seemed to be sincere, still half lost in thought. Young stepped toward the door, aware his time to get to his seminar was ticking away.

 

                “Have a good day,” he said, and headed out of the building, putting the man out of his mind.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter, with an SG-1 guest star!

                Young had a headache, and his back and leg were punishing him for falling asleep on his couch. Too much drinking alone. He almost hadn’t gotten up for class, but the whole reason he’d signed up for classes was so he wouldn’t spend his bad days in bed. He washed his face, shaved, and dressed, trying to force back the loneliness rising into his throat. He made a thermos of coffee instead of breakfast and finished the whole thing on the drive in.

 

                The transition from set theory to combinatorics was not going well for him, and that wasn’t helping either. Though, it was pathetic to blame his crumbling self-esteem on the difficulty of his discrete math problem sets. Emily had sent him a box of his odds and ends, which he’d opened last night. Then he’d opened a bottle of whiskey and drank too much of it on an empty stomach.

 

                He was usually early for class, but today, he was walking in at the same time as Eli, who gave him a grin as he slipped off his sunglasses.

 

                “Party too hard last night?” he asked jovially. Young cut him a hard glance. Eli’s smile disappeared, and he offered up a hesitant,

 

                “Uh, sorry?” as Young continued past him.

 

                A bottle of water and a good amount of painkillers improved his head greatly, though lecture seemed even more confusing than usual. The actual concept of binary trees kept slipping past his grasp. He copied down Rush’s notes and words verbatim, till his hand cramped, and the end result was that he hardly remembered anything from the lecture when Rush stopped talking.

 

                Rush stalked out of the lecture at top speed, as usual, and after his seminar, Young used a computer in the student center (he had never gone inside before, and received many odd looks, with his cane and his age) to look at the online syllabus. Office hours were on the same days as lectures, at twelve. It was only twelve ten, so Young made his way back to the math building, deciphered the directory, and took the elevator.

 

                He stepped out on the third floor and had turned down the first hallway when he came face-to-face with the man he was looking for, walking alongside a tall blonde woman in incongruous slacks and blouse. He stopped dead, as did she.

 

                “Everett!” Sam Carter grinned and addressed him by his first name, which was the only thing that stopped him from finishing the salute he was drawing his body into. Young smiled back, surprised to see her.

 

                “General,” he said. “It’s good to see you.” Rush looked quite dumbfounded by this turn of events, and had gone quiet. Carter was still giving him her genuine smile.

 

                “I didn’t expect to see you here!” she said, shaking his hand and giving him a careful one-armed hug. Young shrugged.

 

                “I’m a student again,” he said. She nodded, gesturing to her head.

 

                “It took me a second, with the hair.”

 

                “Surely you can understand the benefits of long hair?” he asked her. It was strange to see her distinctive blonde hair loose around her shoulders instead of braided back: it went somewhat brown with length, it seemed. She smiled again at his remark.

 

                “Well, when you say it like that,” she allowed. Young glanced over at Rush when she did.

 

                “Doctor,” Carter said, ever polite. “Colonel Everett Young.” Young ducked his head for a moment, wondering how to correct her assumption that they were strangers.

 

                “Colonel?” Rush said dryly, raising an eyebrow. Young gave him his best blank stare. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

 

                “Well,” Carter interjected, then didn’t seem to know what to say. “It was good to speak to you, Doctor. Call me if you need any more information.” She turned back to Young. “Everett, want to grab lunch?”

 

                “Actually, I was coming up to Doctor Rush’s office.” _Carter’s_ eyebrows shot up at this. “I’m a student again,” he repeated. The confusion cleared off her face at that, replaced with mischief.

 

                “And you went for pure math instead of astrophysics?” she said, shaking her head in ironic disapproval. Young snorted.

 

                “Haven’t decided yet.” Carter nodded, and took a business card—an actual business card, with her working addresses, both the Pentagon and Cheyenne Mountain, printed on it—and handed it to him.

 

                “We should have dinner then. I’m not due at my brother’s until late tonight.” Young would have tried to politely decline, but when she passed the card, he spotted a gold ring on her left hand, and decided he should probably eat dinner. To congratulate her, and figure out who the hell it was.

 

                “Sure,” he said.

 

                “Have a nice day,” she said, to them both, and gave Dr. Rush a meaningful look. He raised a hand to bid her farewell, and Young clasped her hand again. Then she was walking down the hall, still looking completely wrong to Young in her civilian clothes.

 

                “Friend of yours?” Rush asked, turning back the way he’d come. “I assume you came for office hours?”

 

                “I did.” Young confirmed. “How do you know Carter?” Rush unlocked a door with his name on and indicated a chair next to his desk, which faced the wall. More accurately, it faced the center of what was a collection of corkboards and taped papers that covered most of the office. The entire room gave off a vibe not unlike _A Beautiful Mind_. Young had no doubt that it scared off students.

 

                “You’re in the Air Force?” Rush’s voice bordered on accusing, as though he had asked Young his profession and been lied to. Young bristled a little.

 

                “I _was._ ” He indicated his cane. “Retired.” Rush picked up a folder that had a typed label and the word ‘confidential’ across it in several places. Likely, what Carter had been here for. “Do you consult for General Carter?” Rush snorted, shoving the folder into a drawer of his desk and pulling out a few sheets of clean paper and a battered copy of their textbook.

 

                “I did, once, solve a problem for the Air Force, but General Carter has never come calling before this past week. Apparently they want me to solve something else.” Young began the process of removing his backpack without torqueing his back too badly, then sitting.

 

                “Must be something big if Carter came,” he grunted, not really having enough room to stretch his leg out under Dr. Rush’s desk without touching the other man.

 

                “She won’t say,” Rush said, just as Young decided _fuck it_ and extended his leg with an

 

                “Excuse me,” as it brushed alongside Rush’s. Rush flinched, and shifted slightly to the side. Young had to admit, he felt much better like this.

 

                “Can’t imagine they need a cryptographer for radar telemetry,” Rush said, opening the textbook to the last chapter they’d covered. Young had to bite back a smile as he realized that Rush was fishing for information, and extremely transparently.

 

                “I couldn’t say,” he said neutrally, and Rush shot him a dark look.

 

                “Of course not,” he replied, as though he hadn’t just been engaging in leading small talk. “I assume your problem is with the trees?” Young blinked.

 

                “Yes, actually.” Rush gave him a somewhat superior look.

 

                “Signs are there in your homeworks.”

 

                “Eli grades those,” Young responded, surprised.

 

                “Yes, but I review them.” He looked pointedly at the textbook. “Do you want help or not?”

 

                Young found Rush more tolerable, but also more intense and demanding, in a one-on-one setting. He explained the concept again, and then again when Young confessed he didn’t understand the jargon, but then made him do problems until he solved them, watching Young work with an unsettling focus.

 

                It was nearly an hour later when Young finished the last problem, and he realized he was immensely hungry. Rush stacked up the papers and handed them to him. Young folded them into his notebook and returned it to his backpack, extracting a powerbar and putting it in his pocket.

 

                “Thanks,” he said. Rush looked impassively at him, brown eyes calculating.

 

                “You don’t have any special gift, but you’re certainly capable if you work at it.” Young hoisted his backpack up and grabbed his cane, trying to parse that statement.

 

                “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” He paused at the door. “You know, I did a major in physics.” Rush, for some reason, broke into a disconcerting grin.

 

                “Oh, did you?” He shook his hair back. “How nice.”

 

                By the time he got to dinner with Sam Carter, Young was fully recovered from his hangover, his study session, and feeling curious. Carter was digging into her “garden wrap with steak”—she had insisted on going to this very California healthy fast food place recommended her by Sheppard—when he brought it up.

 

                “Congratulations,” he said. Carter froze for a second, then glanced down at her hand.

 

                “Hmm,” she said. “I don’t wear it at work—it’s a little odd, you know?” Young shrugged.

 

                “It depends on who’s got the other one,” he said. Carter gave him a look that said she knew exactly what he was doing, but answered him anyway.

 

                “Jack,” she said, taking another bite of her wrap. Young bit his own burger to avoid saying anything for a second. They had had what, fifteen years until she was finally promoted out from under his command? Jack was almost retired for real, now. There had been ugly rumors around 2000, but nothing had ever been seriously suggested.

 

                “That’s a long time to wait,” he said. _That I certainly didn’t manage_ , he didn’t add. “You deserve it.” Carter nodded.

 

                “I know,” she said. “I’ve taken at least one good thing back from the program.” Then she went back to her food without another comment. The Stargate program had fucked up his life, his sleep, his marriage, and his leg: he didn’t have any idea, he felt, what it had probably done to Sam Carter. Young didn’t say anything for a moment, then tried to engage her in idle conversation about San Francisco. She knew a lot of places close to the Bay, courtesy of Sheppard: restaurants and parks and bars.

 

                She wished him well, gave him a laundry list of other people’s well-wishes, and filled him in with more detail on some of his friends. David, who hadn’t called him in two weeks, was on a long mission. He returned all of the sentiments, let her give him a serious look and say that Lam wanted him to call, and then headed home.

 

                Young closed his box of things from Emily that night, put it in a closet, and didn’t think about it, instead doing another set of the hardest problems until he was exhausted. Then, he went to bed without a single drink beyond the water he swallowed his painkiller with.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Classes and work have started again, so who knows what's going to happen to the update "schedule."

San Francisco didn’t really get colder, just rainier, as fall started in earnest. Young, who found his crutch annoying enough, didn’t carry an umbrella and bought a jacket with a hood instead. His backpack kept everything dry well enough, anyway. The constant rain was a shock after years of living in Colorado Springs, and waking up to the foggy drizzle of California had a dreamy, lonely edge to it. He wore his old boots often, now, and they made him feel like he had just walked through a stargate.

               He didn’t have much time to dwell on the weather, though: binary and K-ary trees still required a lot of effort, and he was due to lead discussion in his seminar class in a few days. Young idly scratched his pencil over a half-empty sheet of paper as David’s voice came over the phone. He was glad to hear his friend alive and well, and was only half paying attention to what he was actually saying.

 

                “I’ll be down in a week: I kind of know a guy down there, some friend of Bill Lee’s, and we’re going to grab drinks at that bar Ronon likes.” David pauses on the other end of the line. “You probably never went, did you?”

 

                “No,” Young said simply. David sighs loudly, as though it’s a huge personal affront: to be fair, everything and anything tends to end up being a huge personal affront with him.

 

                “Well, you can come down with us. I’m trying to get Sheppard to take the weekend, too. Science people love him.” Young raised his eyebrows, alone in his kitchen.

               

                “Are you recruiting this guy, then?” he asked. David made a noncommittal sound. Young didn’t press him; he wasn’t in the loop anymore, and it wasn’t his business. David switched conversational gears.

               

                “So are you seeing anyone?” he asked. Young grimaced.

 

                “No.”

 

                “Well, I did score a date with Dr. Gardner at NORAD, she’s, ah, a bit traditional in that it’s going to take a few more before I actually get anywhere—“

 

                “David, I don’t need to know,” he interrupted.

 

                “—which is hard when I’m on missions.” Young was rapidly running out of interest in the conversation, or compassion for David’s hard luck in seducing the people upstairs. “But I’m hopeful.”

 

                “Sounds good,” he said, voice flat. David apparently managed to apply some tact or logic or intuition on the other side of the signal, because he didn’t speak any further on matters of romance, just on his visit.

               

                “I’ll pick you up for the thing,” he said, and Young knew he wasn’t getting out of this one.

 

                His presentation on the latest paper (intelligible to him) on heat-dissipating material had enough practical applications to keep the other students engaged, and was completely removed from issues like wormholes, space flight, and quantum communication. Apparently, though, he mentioned possible military applications too many times, because Renee Kim, in her ROTC uniform, more or less cornered him afterwards and asked if he had military experience or had worked as a contractor.

 

                “I was in the Air Force,” he said. “Medical discharge.” She nodded at his words, eyes very serious.

 

                “If you ever have time, I would really appreciate if you could give me some pointers or advice, or… something.” She ran out of words and stopped, looking a little anxious. Young mentally ran through everything he’d noticed about her in class.

 

                “Don’t end everything you say with “I might be wrong,”” he said finally. “You’re allowed to be wrong in class, you know. Act confident. You can doubt everything you’re doing, but the soldiers under your command can’t ever know that.” She nodded again, chewing on the inside of her cheek and frowning.

 

                “Okay, yes, I’ll try. Thank you,” she nodded once more, saluted—God but he was glad everyone else except the professor had left the room—and left. That had been the best advice he’d ever had from his instructors. Most of his fellow officers in training had been confident to the point of arrogance and had had that beaten out of them. Young had needed goading from the other direction. Renee Kim, he thought, would succeed, but the sooner she got that push, the better.

 

                He went home, reflected on his own dubious successes, and did physical therapy exercises until the sudden urge to call Emily and TJ passed. Then he was left on the rolled-out map on the floor of his living room, feeling sweat move through the longer strands of his hair and down his face, feeling suddenly emptier than he had in weeks. He was good, he was even getting better, at filling the hole in his chest with math practice and making his powerpoints perfect and stitching up old socks and making his knee burn all the way up his spine and into his neck. But he wasn’t perfect, and suddenly the rushing loneliness of his existence came back to him like the awareness of the constant fog of the Bay.

 

                He rolled over onto his back, feeling the heat slowly dissipate from his body, feeling his knee and back spasm as the chill of his sweat suddenly appeared. The ceiling of his living room, with its white and brass fan-and-lamp light fixture, was inexplicably horrible to look at, so he covered his face in his hands and wished he could sit up. He could not, though, not with guilt and loneliness and failure crushing his chest. Who was he kidding, making it through Discrete Math and Topics in Physics like they _meant_ anything, like his life had anything left to it anymore? As though he hadn’t burned his marriage to the ground single-handedly, or very nearly ruined TJ’s career. Like he wasn’t lying on the floor of a nearly empty apartment, with a ruined knee that had taken away everything he’d had left.

 

                After an undetermined amount of time, during which the light in the room lessened and lessened, he finally got up, shaking with cramps and no little cold, and headed into the bathroom. The corner of the floor received his ignominiously kicked-off sneakers, socks, and sweaty shorts and t-shirt, and he turned the shower on. The hot water should make him feel better, and in a way, it did, but as he scrubbed mechanically through his hair and over his body, and watched the suds swirl away down the drain, the heavy weight still pressed down on him.

 

                Despite telling himself it was a bad idea, Young downed half a bottle of the bourbon he really shouldn’t keep, ate a few almonds in an already-drunk attempt to have dinner, and went to bed feeling blissfully light for the first time in weeks.

                He was woken by a damp chill coming in through the screen of his open bedroom window, head pounding so badly he could barely see. It was a Thursday: no class to worry about. He managed to get to the bathroom, swallow some water and ibuprofen, and then went back to bed.

 

                The good part about a hangover was that he got to sleep most of the morning. The bad part was that the reminder that he had no responsibilities and no purpose threw that crushing weight right back onto his shoulders.

 

                He went through all his notes, re-organized them, and re-did every single problem from their first three homeworks, then more tree practice. Dr. Rush’s (possible) compliment had been niggling in the corner of his mind for a few weeks. What the hell did he mean by “capable,” besides the obvious dictionary definition? Quite possibly nothing, Young reminded himself. The class took up well over half of Young’s time and energy, but it certainly couldn’t do the same for Dr. Rush, and trying to analyze his irritable professor’s remarks would get him nowhere.

 

                After he managed to keep down half of a dry turkey sandwich, he ran a load of laundry, went for groceries, found a CD of Johnny Cash’s greatest hits, (courtesy of Sheppard, a few years ago) and played that while he cooked the most elaborate dinner he could. It took time, which was the point, and it tasted fine, though it was too much for one person. He put it away and redid another problem set, thinking that even a few months ago, it was time he was short on. Now he was overflowing with it.

 

                He went to bed untired, barely managing to refrain from knocking back a few shots to keep himself from lying awake. David would be up in the afternoon, to force him into business. It would be good.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, another sad chapter happened. But Rush is in this one!

                David showed up at Young’s apartment at six, came in without really asking, and glanced around the mostly empty space at the front that made up the living room/kitchen. He didn’t say anything, just stood with his hands by his sides and looked like he was under stress, or pissed off. Young could sympathize.

 

                “Sheppard’s not going to make it, I take it?” he said. David’s brows drew together.

               

                “Yeah, something about having seen enough of San Francisco lately. He gets weird about things, sometimes.” Young thought that was an understatement, but didn’t comment. David continued,

 

                “Did you move in here by yourself?”

 

                “Yeah, about everyone I knew was busy at the time.” David kicked idly at the wood of the outdoor stairs, not bothering to pull up the hood of his jacket in the rainy fog, or possibly foggy rain, that hovered in the air.

 

                “Did you hire a mover?” Young saw him visually measuring the distance from the parking lot to the second floor landing.

 

                “Nope,” Young replied. David rolled his eyes.

 

                “For Christ’s sake, Everett, how many months back in recovery did that set you?”

                “The bed was delivered.” David let out an irritated sniff through his nose. Young bit back a smile: this was familiar, David showing his concern by asking a series of questions and then getting annoyed about the answers.

 

                They took a cab, David informing him that the beer at the place they were headed was brewed on-site, with local hops and grain. Young dourly imagined a very tidy place, frequented by people who were well-informed about all their food choices. At first blush, that sort of place wouldn’t be Ronon’s style, but he had an ironic appreciation for modern things done in a faux-traditional way, which he’d picked up from Sheppard.

 

                The bar/brewery was at appropriate dimness, at least, and Young let David order them both one of the place’s own recipes. It was good, and sitting down at the barstool had been pretty easy on his hip.

 

                “So what the hell is with the hair?” Young snorted.

 

                “Everyone has to comment.”

 

                “I thought it would be curly, but not that curly.”

 

                Young rolled his eyes and read a carefully chalked blackboard on the wall that announced live music, starting at eight. Tonight was “Ballad Night,” apparently. David described his date with Dr. Gardner in NORAD, listing out, as far as Young could tell, everything she had told him about herself, and then his plans to be interested in a strategic number of her interests.

 

                “She claims to love chess, but I’m pretty sure I can beat her, based on the general vibe I get from that floor’s other chess players.”

 

                “Does she know she’s not dating you, but actually engaging in the weird kind of one-upmanship and spying you find arousing?” Young said dryly. David didn’t look abashed at all, because they’d gone through this line before. Young had lost the moral high ground, now, but the argument was old and familiar.

 

                At quarter to seven, David turned around on his stool and stood up. Waving casually from the door was a heavyset, dark man in a white shirt and purple tie. Flanking him, in similar states of business casual, were a dark-haired woman, and, looking uncomfortable, Dr. Rush. Young, trying to conceal his shock and mild unease at being in another not-in-class interaction with the man, turned and drained the very last of his beer. He had been lingering over it for too long anyway, but the last thing he needed was David asking him how much or fast he was drinking.

 

                “Richard,” David said warmly, shaking the man’s hand. Young levered himself to his feet, grabbing his crutch. “Thanks so much for meeting.”

 

                “Any friend of Bill Lee’s is a friend of mine, Colonel Telford.” Richard replied, and Young detected a Nigerian accent, heavily diluted with California. “Thanks for the invite. You said to bring company; these are my colleagues—those I call friends, anyway—Dr. Constance North and Dr. Nicholas Rush.”

 

                “It’s David, please,” he was shaking Dr. North and Dr. Rush’s hands quickly. “Everett Young, old friend of mine who recently moved out here. This is Dr. Richard Okochu.”

 

                Young shook hands with Dr. Okochu, who similarly insisted on being addressed by his first name, and Dr. North, who smiled in a friendly way and said the same. Rush shook his hand with a wry twist to his mouth.

 

                “We can forgo formality, then,” he said quietly. David and Richard were making obligatory noises about sitting down, and they ended up at a table at the wall. Apparently this bar boasted a moderately impressive collection of California wines and liquor as well as beer, and when they got service a few minutes later, Constance asked for wine and Rush for a glass of whiskey. Young stuck with the first beer, and Richard turned out to be the type of person who liked to ask the waiter’s opinion.

 

                Young let David lead the conversation: Richard could give him a run for his money in terms of talking, and Constance joined in every so often. Dr. Rush didn’t seem pleased to be there, sitting across from Young and next to Constance, who would glance over at him or touch his arm every so often. He sipped on his whiskey and occasionally contributed to the conversation; he was slightly inclined to say things that sounded anxious, and subsided for long minutes after he spoke. Young let David lead him into more or less everything he said, which was perfectly fine with him in a place like this.

 

                They talked variously about San Francisco and Colorado Springs, Richard reminisced about his graduate school days with Bill Lee, and David spent a lot of time trying to draw Dr. Rush into conversation. Young felt a flicker of trepidation at the hunger in his friend’s eyes, which occasionally rose right up into view. He remembered the “confidential” folder from Sam Carter, and wondered if Richard Okochu, who, if Young understood correctly, modeled tick-borne disease dispersion, was the real recruitment target.

 

                He wasn’t in the loop anymore, and as much as he missed Cheyenne Mountain and the stargate sometimes, it was unsettling to watch David prowl around these settled, comfortable academics with the goal of uprooting them and possibly shoving them into life-threatening situations. He ordered a third beer, conceding to Richard and David’s demands he try something new, and wondered about the potential university career Lisa Park, the scientist on his gate team, had maybe left behind.

 

                The advertised live music had been setting up in a corner, and started at eight-fifteen. There was a guitarist, a fiddler, and a keyboardist, all dressed in the kind of clothes that Young saw three days a week on campus. At the first scrape of bow across the violin, Rush jerked upright, frowning. Constance seemed to snap into some kind of wariness next to him, as well.

 

                “I’m going outside for a cigarette,” Rush said shortly, and left quickly. Constance looked distressed as the first chords of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” sounded. It was Young’s turn to wince: Emily loved Bonnie Tyler. She always sang this one in the shower.

 

                “I’m going out too,” he said, didn’t bother to explain that he didn’t smoke, and headed for the door as fast as he could.

 

                Rush was, as he said, smoking, at the minimum acceptable distance from the door. He didn’t even notice Young step outside, until he walked over to Rush and stood there, feeling awkward. This was a situation in which Young generally liked to put his hands in his pockets, but that wasn’t really an option with his damned cane. Rush looked over at him.

 

                “Do _you_ need a cigarette?” he snapped. Young tried to remind himself that Rush had left distressed, and ground his teeth.

 

                “No, thank you.” He could still hear the guitar, occasionally, but isolated. Snatches of words, no recognizable melody.

 

                “Tell Constance I’m probably going to take a cab back,” Rush replied. Young shifted his weight.

 

                “You’re not going back in?” Rush took a long pull on his cigarette and exhaled, the smoke catching light and hanging in front of his angular face for long moments.

 

                “No.”

 

                “The song won’t last forever,” Young told him. Rush glared at him, but when he spoke, his voice was quiet, sad.

 

                “It’s not the song.” He stuck his cigarette between his lips and touched his right hand with his left, fiddling at the gold ring Young had never noticed before. It was on his right finger, and the light in the street was dim, but it was clearly a wedding ring. Young clenched his left hand, feeling the empty space where his ring used to be.

 

                “My wife,” he paused. “My ex-wife loves this song.” Rush didn’t say anything, just took the cigarette out of his mouth and breathed out again. Then inhaled again. His shoulders were hunched, though he was glaring straight ahead with the same intensity as always. Young could guess that Rush’s wife must be dead, based on the ring on his other finger. He didn’t need to wait for him to say it, and he didn’t need to know what the hell had triggered this in the bar. It wasn’t fair, to stand outside with him, even if they weren’t in class right now, because Young knew that messing around with standing and rank and protocol and formality could end badly.

 

                “I could convince David to go somewhere else,” he said finally. Rush cut him a glance.

 

                “I think the evening’s done for me,” he said, voice closer to having its usual hard edge. Young took that as a good sign. He wished the evening were done for him, too, but David would be pissed if he left him now.

 

                Rush ground out his cigarette butt on the sidewalk, earning a few dirty looks, and pulled out his phone, presumably to call a taxi. Young left him with a nod, which Rush even returned, dipping his chin down quickly.

 

                David bore the news that Rush had departed with an irritated twitch of his mouth; Constance nodded, her expression of slight worry unchanged. Richard, who was slightly drunk, didn’t seem to mind, just smiled and kept talking. The song had changed. Young wondered whether ballad night would continue to be customary at this place: it certainly set a mood, though not an exuberant or upbeat one.

 

                They finished a little before ten, and shared a cab back to their various stopping-off points. Young was second, after Constance, and allowed Richard to shake his hand vigorously as he got out. He moved through his barren apartment without turning the lights on until he got to the bedroom, with its small attached bathroom. The motions of getting ready to sleep were automatic, his mind churning, the slight haze four strong beers had given him all but gone.

 

                His own grief was like a spreading cloud over his functionality, and lessening, with occasional peaks and valleys, but he imagined Rush’s grief to be like a wound in the heart, easily re-opened. That was how it had been when his father died. The evening blurred together ominously with his encounter with Sam Carter and Rush’s office hours, the pain-hazed memory of his last trip through a stargate, bleeding, tied to a makeshift stretcher, hearing the gate turn with the knowledge that this was the last time seizing coldly around his heart, and the uncertain, clean voice of the singer at the bar, crying out “together we can take it to the end of the line.” Young fell asleep to uneasy dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually think "Total Eclipse of the Heart" isn't too bad a song for them, lyrically speaking. Anyway.
> 
> Also, Dr. Okochu is totally made up, though there _is_ a researcher specializing in tick-borne diseases at UC Berkeley.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, I have productive days and write whole chapters at a time. Bit shorter, but hopefully brighter.

                There was a slight shift in the way Dr. Rush treated him, Young thought. It wasn’t anything remarkable, just that his implacable stare seemed to have a little more patience in it when he met Young’s eyes in class, and that he was now one of five or so students he addressed by name when asking a question. This was somewhat soothing to Young, for some reason. Maybe because, now that Young had seen something dark and painful under his snarling exterior, Rush wasn’t pretending it hadn’t happened. Or at least, he wasn’t reacting to its happening in a way that was detrimental to Young’s progress in the class. He was grateful for this, because he was rapidly beginning to think that he wasn’t cut out for a mathematician.

 

                “Why _did_ you come here, anyway?” Eli asked, pen scratching over the sheet of paper one of the other students had handed him on his way out. “Couldn’t you get some fancy consultant job after you left, I thought that was what most military officers did.” Young winced at the vigor with which his classmate’s work was being corrected and circled, and shrugged.

 

                “Not for me.” He had gotten out with an honorable discharge, but Camile Wray had confronted him in the empty infirmary two days after his surgery and hissed out a number of threats, including reporting him for abuse of power and fraternization, if he stayed at Cheyenne Mountain. She had been very protective over TJ, though at that point, they had already ended it. He couldn’t blame her, and had taken his life here instead.

 

                “But why here?” Eli pressed. Young reflected.

 

                “I guess because I knew people who were from San Francisco,” he said finally. Eli snorted, unimpressed.

 

                “I guess that’s not a terrible reason,” he said, tone suggesting that it was the most boring thing he’d ever heard. Young sighed.

 

                “Why did you come here?”

 

                “I got an assistantship. And California, duh. And _Berkeley,_ duh. Trust me, from someone who dropped out of college the first time I tried it, when Berkeley calls, you don’t say no.”

               

                “Right,” Young said. He turned back to his paper. At this rate, he was never going to get any work done.

 

                He showed up to Rush’s office hours the Friday after that discussion, surprised to see no one else there. There was always plenty of muttered complaining in the lecture hall before Rush walked in, and louder complaining to Eli, who took it in stride.

 

                “Back again,” Rush said, and indicated the chair next to his desk once more.

 

                “Am I cutting too much into your designated time for helping students?” Young asked. To his relief, Rush exhaled in what could pass for an amused manner and sat next to him.

 

                “I’m surprised you haven’t seen enough of _me_ ,” Rush corrected him, definitely amused.

 

                “Right. Sorry about that. David believes in socialization.” Young shrugged, turning to the first page of his work on introductory graph theory. Rush laughed, actually smiling for a moment.

 

                “We have similar friends,” he said, with a growling edge to his voice, as though his friends were a nuisance, or he was afraid to show he appreciated them. Young thought of Constance North and of David.

 

                “I doubt that,” he replied, but Rush was already looking over his work, tapping his fingers over Young’s drawings.

 

                “This is very often difficult to conceptualize, especially for realistic or linear thinkers. Your approach is fine, but it’s going to make it easy for you to make mistakes with nonplanar graphs. You really need to master a computational or theoretical approach if you’re going to progress.” He corrected notations next to two of the drawings. “See? Errors.”

 

                Since he was no longer sixteen, it was unacceptable for him to put his head on his paper and groan, but he really wanted to. Rush pointed to a problem in the middle of the chapter.

 

                “Solve that, but without a sketch.”

 

                He got about halfway through before his brain gave up.

 

                “I don’t think I actually can,” he said, trying not to let his annoyance into his voice.

 

                “That’s okay,” Rush said, and gave him a half-smile. “A lot of people can’t.”

 

                “Then why did you make me try?” Young was aware that he did sound annoyed, now. He also felt embarrassed.

 

                “Because doing as much as you can without drawing the graph is going to make it easier for you to catch and find errors. It will take longer, but you’ll understand better.” Rush leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. “Faster isn’t better.”

 

                Well, that was part of the reason he was taking this class: to fill up his time.

 

                “Is this how you solve these?” he asked, wondering suddenly. In his experience, experts could be prone to giving advice they would never follow.

 

                “Not quite,” Rush said. “It’s more of…I don’t need to draw them, because I can see and conceptualize them mentally. Most math is very easy for me, I don’t struggle to understand n-dimensional concepts, or connectivity.” He said it neutrally, neither proud nor self-conscious about a quirk that Young thought was probably rare. “It does make it tricky to teach.” There was a flash of irony there.

 

                “You just…get it?” Young asked. Rush tilted his head.

 

                “Not at first, usually, but yes. Once I understand, I just “get it.”” He pointed to another problem. “Go through what you’re doing when you solve this. You can think out loud if you want.”

 

                It made Young feel extremely self-conscious to stumble through his slow process of solving the problems, working out chromatics with simple fucking grade-school division before things got so complex he had to draw pictures. Rush watched and listened all the while, and nodded when he was done.

 

                “Clearly the pictures are useful to you, but learn to get the basics from the notations before you draw them, and you’ll be fine.”

 

                “Right,” Young said, rubbing at his eyes. “Thanks.” He put his papers back in his backpack, watching Rush drum his fingers on his desk. He offered him a smile, and Rush returned the hint of one. That was about as good as he was going to get, he figured, and left the office, shutting the door carefully behind him.

 

                He did make slightly fewer mistakes solving the problems this way, though he wanted to punch a wall by the time he was done. Instead of doing that, or drinking, he did his PT exercises, and then the kid version of pushups, knees on the foam mat. It helped seep out some of the rage that his homework had built up inside. No wonder half the science personnel were such prickly assholes all the time, if their work was this frustrating. Then again, it shouldn’t be frustrating for _them_.

 

                At the next recitation section, Eli raised his eyebrows an impressive height at Young.

 

                “You are now one of the favored,” he intoned, handing back his heavily marked homework. Young looked at it.

 

                “I doubt that,” he said. “What did you do, spill ink on this?”

 

                “Oh no,” Eli said. “The ballpoint writing is mine, and is my typical grading. The actual ink is Dr. Rush’s writing. He always looks over the homeworks, to make sure I’m not slacking off, and he takes out his favorites and goes over them intensively.” Young studied his paper more carefully. As Eli had said, the Xs and checks of his greying ballpoint pen were present, but over them were corrections and comments.

 

                “That must take him a long time,” Young said eventually. Rush had redrawn one of his graphs, and renumbered the nodes. Eli huffed.

 

                “Not as long as it takes me to grade these! He only does it for two or three students in a lecture. Like I said, you’re favored.”

 

                “I still don’t know if I’d say that.”

 

                “Trust me, he likes you, or he wouldn’t waste his precious time.” Eli was half on his way to ranting. “I swear to god. He has tenure, but he spends his entire life in his office or harassing _us_ to get things done.”

 

                “Eli,” Young said dryly, in the voice he used to favor to get Lisa to calm down. Eli stopped, letting out a dramatic sigh.

 

                “Are you ever going to come drink with us or what?” he asked, switching topics. “Also, you’re officially invited to watch B-movies with us in the physics student lounge. Caitlin and I are on for live riffing tomorrow night, and it’s _Battlefield Earth_ , so you really don’t want to miss it.”

 

                “Sounds like it,” Young said, thinking that the invasion of Earth and subsequent enslavement of the human race was better kept to terrible movies than his nightmares.

 

                “Well, if you can’t make it tomorrow, next week Rob is doing _Wormhole X-Treme_ , episodes one through three.” Young managed to not flinch at that, and forced down a reflexive smile. Eli fist-pumped. “I knew you would know at least something I mentioned! Though, I did not expect it to be that travesty. Honestly, it’s really a shame that the show is so bad, because the game is amazing, and the show gives it a bad rep.”

 

                “Eli, I actually come here to work.” Young was amused, but growing closer to annoyed. Eli looked repentant, and hopped off the table to wander around the room and strafe people with assistance. Young turned back to his paper, looking at the scrawl of black ink over his work. _Favored_ , Eli had said. It was a foreign concept to him, now, but felt kind of nice.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was so long in coming! Real life got hectic for a while.

                Despite Eli’s constant invitations, Young did not attend terrible movie nights with the computer science students. He got rid of the alcohol in his apartment, by dint of not buying any more when he finished what he had. He kept studying, and sort of wished he could, like the other students, have a group of friends to study with in the evenings. But he had dug his own grave by not engaging with them earlier in the semester. There was nothing for it but to struggle through recitation with Eli’s help, look things up online, and then admit defeat and go to office hours.

                “You’re downright ubiquitous,” Rush commented when Young showed up the second week in a row, his heavily marked homework set and the new one both in hand. He didn’t sound upset, and cleared his messy desk off quickly. There must, Young thought, be some method to the madness, but it was not visible to him.

                “You make yourself available,” he countered, smiling slightly. Rush shifted out of the way so Young could extend his bad leg underneath the desk, though now, it was a lot less painful to move than it had been earlier in the semester.

                The new problem set hadn’t given him as much trouble as usual, so he only had two questions for Rush. Last week’s, though, looked especially gruesome with Rush’s extra notes on every problem. Rush plucked it delicately from his fingers.

                “Ah, yes, this gave you some trouble, didn’t it?” He sounded amused as he glanced over his own annotations.

                “Apparently,” Young growled, and Rush turned back to the front page, shooting him a smile that was definitely at Young’s expense.

                “I’m surprised you go over the old ones,” he said. “Though, as you say, I am available to help.” Young shrugged.

                “We haven’t had the test yet,” he replied, and Rush smiled a little, then picked up his pen and blank paper.

                “Very true.” He tapped on the second problem. “This is where you went wrong.”

                Young’s brain was in its usual state of slush when they finally finished, and his stomach was starting to feel hollow. That must have been why he accidentally opened his mouth and joked,

                “Eli says the heavy marking is a sign of favoritism.” Rush leaned back slightly in his seat and slowly raised an eyebrow.

                “Don’t let it go to your head,” he said, voice sharp and amused. He didn’t even brush off Eli’s words, and Young wasn’t sure if he was joking, but something in his stomach turned unsettled without warning. He couldn’t decide if it was unpleasant through his hunger, and nodded to Rush and left.

                Young made himself a sandwich when he got home, reflected that most of his conversations, outside of his physics seminar, were with either Eli or Rush, and decided that was fine, as long as he was occasionally having conversations. He went through his usual routine of strength exercises for his knee: the joint was much better now, if not perfect. The pain that twisted up his back was still there, but it was just pain, not actual stress on his back and hip. Dr. Lam had recommended a heating pad to ease up tension that came from the pain, and he had to admit that it helped. He had ventured to the library earlier in the week and now had three novels and a book on ancient Egypt, which was almost solely for ironic curiosity. Not in the mood for more math, after his long discussion with Rush, he started one of his books, a long adventure story involving a surprisingly interesting explanation for a buried treasure plot.

                It was late afternoon when he woke up, back unpleasantly hot from the heating pad, which he had certainly left on for longer than the recommended time. His book was in his lap, pages fanned open. His phone was ringing, he realized. He pulled it out of his pocket and answered.

                “Hello?”

                “Everett,” it took him a second, but he recognized General Carter’s voice: even, professional, and friendly.

                “What can I do for you?” he replied, disentangling himself from the heating pad. There was a brief pause.

                “You know Nicholas Rush, right?” There was no way Carter would have forgotten that.

                “Yes,” he said.

                “I need him to reply to me, but I can’t come to Berkeley to remind him.” Young tried to think of how to respond. If he wasn’t returning emails or calls, because Carter would definitely have tried both, then he didn’t want to talk to her.

                “Coming down to see old friends in academia is more Jackson’s style,” he said neutrally. That got a short laugh out of her.

                “Can you please talk to him?” She asked him point-blank, to her credit. Young considered.

                “No,” he finally said. “I can’t run errands for…you guys anymore, and I certainly can’t ask my professor.”

                “It was worth a shot,” Carter said, sounding stressed and dejected. He felt a sudden spike of guilt. It could be something important, and God knew Carter had to split her time twenty ways. But, no: if it was truly, world-endingly important, she would come down. He compromised.

                “David knows him, you could ask David to talk to him.”

                “David Telford?” Carter said sharply.

                “Yes,” Young said cautiously. “He was recruiting some other professor here, who knows Rush. They met that way.”

                “He’s never mentioned it,” Carter said, sounding confused. “I guess I could ask him.” Young felt an uncomfortable coiling in his chest. Carter, while one of his favorite people, an excellent scientist, and a brilliant soldier, had no political skills and relied entirely on reason and good intentions. It served her well, usually, but the lack of communication in this particular situation seemed ominous to him.

                “Sure,” he said.

                “I wish I could actually chat, but,” the thing was that Carter probably did want to talk to him, at least to make up for her request.

                “Don’t worry about it,” he told her, putting the SGC far from his mind.

                “Right,” she said, and hung up. Young rubbed his face. He wanted a drink. He decided on forcing himself to enjoy his book, and ignoring the Stargate program’s habit of following him around via his math professor.

                He went to office hours again on Friday, though, for no other reason than to scan Rush’s desk and office for green file folders and locked metal briefcases. Rush looked surprised to see him so soon, but started his piling up of papers on his desk.

                “I was just checking to see if I left my water bottle here, actually,” Young lied, having no further questions to ask and no excuse to be there, staring around the room. Rush’s hands stilled on his papers, face impassive.

                “Do you think it’s here?” he asked quietly, narrowing his eyes slightly. Young resisted the urge to bristle, because he _had_ just lied.

                “It’s no big deal,” he said, shrugging, and backed closer to the door. Rush was already turning away, but he raised his hand briefly in acknowledgement when Young bid him have a nice afternoon.


	8. Chapter 8

                The end of the semester arrived with California’s version of winter: even more drizzling rain and a mild temperature drop. Young wore his trousers or jeans tucked into his combat boots as he splashed around campus, ignoring the stares of the other students in favor of dry feet. He also bought a rug for the front door of his apartment, to collect the rain from his shoes. Aside from that, nothing much changed except for the composition of vegetables in his fridge. He had acquired a crockpot from a garage sale, been instructed in its use by the elderly woman selling it, and had fallen into the habit of stuffing it full of vegetables and pieces of stew beef in the morning. As long as he added enough onions, the results were always pretty palatable come evening, and it lasted him a few days every time.

                San Francisco was, against his expectations and in line with his hopes, beginning to feel, if not like home, then homelike. He still woke up lonely, but he had managed to unpack his CDs and had tacked up a few old posters from before he had been married. Lisa did watercolor painting, and had given him a box of them upon his leaving the SGC, so those could go on the window wall of the living room.

                Berkeley was largely the same, with an air of creeping panic starting to permeate the air. Even Eli, who never seemed perturbed by much, spent the second –to-last recitation session focused on his laptop, downing his Coke methodically with the unmistakable look of someone waiting for a caffeine hit to kick in. Young had a final review to write for Topics in Physics, and the third and final exam in Discrete Math to study for, but nothing more. He also flattered himself that he was less panic-prone than the average sleep-deprived, overcaffeinated university student.

                This, though, would be no guarantee of doing well on his finals. His final paper for the physics class was coming along, as he had chosen an engineering subtopic to focus on, rather than something theoretical, and the research was comprehensible. He’d been briefly tempted to write about multiverse theory, but the truth of the matter was that he didn’t understand the math of it, despite having personally seen the results of inter-universe travel. So he felt reasonably positive about that class.

                Rush’s class was an entirely different matter. He’d made a seventy on the last one, which was, according to the statistics Rush gave, perfectly average for the class. A seventy overall in the class was a little less than he expected of himself, however, and so he needed to do better, or at least not worse, on the final.

                To his surprise, Young was not the only student at office hours: two thin young men, one with short black hair and one with short blond hair, both with glasses, were present when he arrived, as usual, at twelve-fifteen on Wednesday. He felt a short burst of irritation at this: he was used to having all of Rush’s attention, and he could say with greater than fifty percent surety that neither of them had ever come before.

                There were no extra chairs in his office, and Young debated leaving and coming back on Friday, but if there were going to be more students then, he would have the same problem. He paused in the open doorway, apparently for too long, because Rush glanced around and saw him. His face drew into a slight frown.

                “Everett,” he said. “I expect I’ll be finished with these gentlemen in twenty minutes or so.” He flicked his eyes back to the two students flanking him, anxious expressions on their faces.

                “I can come back another day,” Young offered, trying not to glare at the kids, who no doubt had busier class schedules than he did. Rush just shook his head, leaned over to one of the bookshelves on the wall, and extracted a paperback. He tossed it to Young, who caught it reflexively and turned it over. _G_ _ödel, Escher, Bach:_ _An Eternal Golden Braid._

                “In the meantime. You might like it.”

                Young was twelve pages and the start of a headache into the book when the other two students left, the sound of them donning rain jackets swishing past him as he sat in one of the hallway chairs. He looked over to Rush’s door to see the man himself standing in it, arms folded. He closed the book and approached Rush, checking his watch to see that it was nearly one. As if on cue, his stomach growled quietly.

                “We can talk over lunch, if you like,” Rush said, pulling a jacket on. “I haven’t eaten recently, we might both do better.”

                “No objections,” Young said, pulling up his own hood and handing Rush the book back. He took it and stuck it back inside his office.

                “You should finish it sometime.”

                “It might be a bit beyond me,” he said cautiously. Rush snorted but declined to respond. Young stopped in front of the elevator and hit the down button. Three flights of stairs was an unappealing prospect at the moment. Rush followed him inside, taking up a silent and moderately awkward stance which made it obvious he was trying not to stare at Young’s leg. He still limped a little, despite having abandoned the cane except for the days he woke up in unexpected agony. Young looked back at him flatly and his eyes sharpened.

                “You don’t have the crutch anymore,” he said.

                “No,” Young agreed. Rush pulled the hood of his jacket over his head as they stepped out of the elevator and headed to the doors. The rain had become an uninspired mist which hung in the air as much as it fell. In an almost disappointingly predictable move, Rush turned in the direction of the closest food vendor, a small characterless cafeteria a few steps off campus. It was full mostly of students and faculty from the nearby buildings, some with papers at their places.

                Young ordered a hamburger and fries: the hamburger and its bun looked unassuming, though the fries were covered in some sort of fragrant seasoning and were visibly steaming. Rush was already sitting, somehow having acquired a cup of coffee, a bowl of soup that was half drunk already, and a more appetizing looking sandwich than Young’s in the time Young had spent getting his burger.

                “How’s classes?” Rush inquired in a tone that communicated that he didn’t care at all. Young chewed on a fry as Rush extracted a notebook and pen from his bag.

                “Fine,” he replied. There was a sort of nameless tension surrounding Rush at the moment, and he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was just Young’s own lingering annoyance at finding office hours more popular than usual.

                “Are you going to continue taking maths?” he asked abruptly. Young blinked, somewhat blindsided by the question.

                “I haven’t decided yet.” He bit into his burger, which had an excellent tomato and not much else to remark upon. “I’m not very good.”

                “You have potential,” Rush said, stretching out the end of his sentence. “I can’t tell why you’re taking classes though, which makes it hard to give you any useful advice.”

                “I thought it would be interesting,” Young said. “And it is.” Rush gave him a faint smile before returning to his soup. It didn’t look half bad, but he scooped it into his mouth with a haste that seemed unnecessary.

                “Well, if knowledge for knowledge’s sake is your motivation, I can only encourage you to continue.” He shoved his bowl to the side and turned to the sandwich. “You’re doing well in class.” Young ate another fry and tried to process the compliment. Rush gave him a wry look, having amused himself somehow, and flipped to a new sheet in the notebook. “Ready?”

                Going over problems in the cafeteria instead of the office was slightly louder, and got potato crumbs on Young’s papers, but his head was swimming as much as ever when Rush finally tore the papers from his notebook and gave them to Young to put in his. It all went into his backpack, and the empty trays and plates to the tray return.

                Outside, the rain had stopped entirely, leaving every leafy plant in the vicinity to drip down around them. Young did not put his hood back up, because the considerable dripping of the trees didn’t count as enough water in anyone’s book. This and the misty air made Rush’s grey-brown hair collect little droplets that lined the strands as though they were spiderwebs.

                “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll see you in class.” The words felt odd to Young even as he said them. There was something heavy in between them, some annoying awkwardness that never had been present before, and Rush didn’t even seem to notice it. Young supposed he should count that as a good thing. Rush gave him a nod and turned back toward the math building. For a split second, Young wanted to walk with him, but there was no reason to, and it wouldn’t do the weird tension in his stomach and chest any good.

                He turned back towards his car, not minding as much as usual the thought of returning to his apartment. He had plenty of studying to do, and he did need to think about whether he would continue taking classes. He had Rush’s recommendation that he do so, at least, which counted for something.


	9. Chapter 9

                The final exam for Discrete Math was a three-hour block, and Eli and a mathematics graduate student Young had never seen before arrived with Rush to proctor it. It wasn’t much longer than their usual tests, which mean that they had the benefit of more time than normal. He picked up his pencil and turned to the first page. _1a. Let C n be the number of full binary trees with n internal nodes. What is a formula, involving binomial coefficients, for Cn? _Young couldn’t help but smile. The first part of the first question would at least be something he remembered how to do.

                He turned in his paper ten minutes before the end of the testing period, and Rush gave him a nod as he handed the test over. The steps to the door of the lecture hall were remarkably easier than they had been at the start of the semester, and he didn’t have to lift his right leg behind his left with every step anymore. At the door, he turned and glanced behind him. To his surprise, Rush was staring right at him, his face unreadable, eyes partially hidden by the glare on his glasses. Young pushed open the door and, reluctantly, turned his back on his way out.

                He felt unaccountably down that evening—no, that wasn’t true. He was morose because he no longer had any reason to go and see the man who could, arguably, be called his only friend. David counted, of course, but David was hundreds of miles away, and would remain so, with the rest of his old team and coworkers. His usual stew would have gone down better with a beer or four, he reflected, but there was a reason he didn’t do that anymore. Maybe he should sign up for classes again. But, he knew that the only other course that Rush taught was a very high level graduate course on cryptography theory. So what was the point? The likelihood of meeting another student or instructor who would tolerate him the same way was low, and Rush, he thought, had little more than toleration and a slight curiosity, as if at a strange sight, for him.

                Two days after that exam, he went back to campus to turn in his physics paper and made a detour for the mathematics building, pulling his hood up against a late-afternoon drizzle. The third floor, composed of offices and a few small seminar and conference rooms, was quiet as ever. Young knocked on Rush’s office door.

                “Come in,” the response came, and Young turned the handle and paused in the doorway. Rush looked up at him, minimizing a window on his computer screen. He looked tired, or perhaps it was just that he didn’t seem to have shaved in a few days. “Everett.”

                “What do you think I should do?” he asked, abruptly. “Is there any point to me continuing to study?”

                “Do you not _want_ to?” Rush asked. Young gave him an ironic smile.

                “I think we both know I’m not going to be a mathematician,” he said. “Though I like the math, as much as anything.”

                “That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement, to be quite honest,” Rush didn’t sound offended about his discipline, at least. “So why are you conflicted about continuing?” That went to the heart of it, didn’t it?

                “I don’t do well with change,” he said, and Rush used a foot to shove a chair towards him. He stepped forward, into the office, and sat down. “I’ve been trying to get my bearings. The end of the semester unsettles all that.”

                “Classes change,” Rush said, and half-shrugged. Young struggled for words.

                “It’s not the classes.” He got a narrow smile in return for that, and Rush’s dark eyes bore into his.

                “What else is changing, then?” Young felt the awkwardness of their last study session settle in as if it had never left, and looked away. His chest felt heavy and light at once.

                “You’re the only person I talk to regularly, you know.” He risked a glance at Rush, who was now staring at the wall, face drawn deep into a frown and mouth tight.

                “Well,” Rush said, and he sounded—relieved? Perhaps frightened? As though he was controlling his voice. “I think we’ve demonstrated that I have at least an hour to spare each week.” He offered Young a slight smile, and though it was small and fleeting, it was the most sincere smile he’d ever seen on the man, with the exception of his excitement in class over whatever he was talking about.

                “Okay,” Young said, and his voice sounded rough even in his own ears. He gave Rush a smile in return, feeling embarrassed. He pressed his lips together for a second, trying to think of what to say.

                Someone knocked on the door. Thank God.

                “Come in,” Rush said, and Young turned to see a young man in a suit standing outside. He looked as if he was dressed for an interview, and very out of place for the building. Young didn’t like the look of him, feeling something prickle at the back of his neck and in his palms.

                “Dr. Rush?” he asked. Rush tilted his head slightly in acknowledgement.

                “How can I help you?”

                “I represent a group of businesspeople: we’re very interested in employing you for a consult.” Rush gave him a hard-eyed stare.

                “I do outside consultation infrequently, and it has to be arranged with the department and the college. If you need me for something, send me a letter or an email, please.” Despite his wording, he sounded distinctly impolite, and impatient. Young reflected back on his first impression of Rush and wondered at how different he was in a teaching situation versus this one. “I’m quite busy.”

                “I don’t think so,” the tone of the young man’s voice changed into something heavy, ugly, and harsh. Young straightened up in his chair, the prickling at his skin turning to a crawling sensation.

                “Excuse me?” said Rush, somewhere between affronted and disbelieving.

                “You will come with us,” the man said, and Young got to his feet, the motion of rising, grabbing for the man’s wrist as he moved his hand to his back, and jerking him forward so familiar that the twinge in his back that came with it felt disconnected.

                The man reached with his other hand, and Young reacted on instinct, rushing him backwards and slamming into the wall of the office, grabbing his face with his free hand and making sure his head connected heavily. Rush had jumped to his feet and a little backwards, eyes wide.

                “What the hell?” he said, softly, too shocked to yell. Young didn’t have time to calm him down, because the young man shoved him back, much more forcefully than he’d expected, and pinned him down on Rush’s desk, scattering papers.

                “Stop it!” Rush snarled, at maybe both of them. Young blinked, trying to ignore the curling pain going through his hip and back. It was all nerve damage, his frame was fine, it only _felt_ like his spine was being ripped apart. “Get out of my office!” Young tried to draw one leg up, to shove him in the chest, but they were too close. He gritted his teeth and sat up against the pressure anyway, kicking the man’s ankles.

                “Rush, why don’t you _leave_?” he growled, because if he was going to get into fights with men who reached for hidden guns in his professor’s office, he’d at least like Rush to get something out of it. Rush instead got one hand around the face of the man grappling with Young, digging his fingers at his eyes, dragging him backwards with a fierce kind of strength Young didn’t expect out of him.

                Young felt hopeful for one brief moment, then the door to the office was filled with two other figures in suits, and something caught him hard in the face, sending him reeling back, stumbling over a chair. His vision greyed out for a moment, and he straightened with difficulty, only to be knocked back down, this time to the floor. He could hear scuffling nearby, so Rush was still fighting whoever the hell these people were. There was a sharp yell, and the sound of a vicious blow. Something crashed hard into Rush’s desk.

                “Silence!” someone snarled, and Young thought must have hit his head hard, because he hadn’t heard that kind of reverb in anyone’s voice in nearly a year. He blinked his eyes open to a distinctive noise of electrical potential building combined with a metallic scrape. The first man was standing over him, eyes gold and glowing. The blunt metal snout of a zat’nik’tel was pointed directly into his face, and he hardly had time to flinch and tense before it discharged in a blinding blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to the math department at Florida Tech who post problem sets online that I can copy for use in my fics!   
> Notes: the UC system is under quarters, not semesters, which I didn't know when I started this fic. Whoops. Also, the next chapters are going to involve a lot of references to SG-1 canon, but I plan to make it all comprehensible if you're not familiar with that.


	10. Chapter 10

                Young opened his eyes to dirty cinderblock walls lit in dim yellow. His head ached, and his back was in agony. He closed his eyes for a moment, processed the bruises forming all over his body, a sharp pain at the bridge of his nose, the feeling of dried crusted blood on his face, and the pulling, tingling sensation of his hands being tied behind his back. He was lying on a hard floor that was gritty with dirt. He opened his eyes slowly, wondering if he could or should move. His legs weren’t tied.

                He was half on his stomach and half on his side, and could make out the legs and feet of someone also lying on the floor. It wasn’t Rush—whoever it was was wearing high, heavy boots and black leather pants.

                A door creaked open behind him, letting in a gust of musty air. Someone’s shoes clicked on the floor.

                “Why did you bring him?” A woman’s voice, deepened and doubled with a goa’uld inflection.

                “I had to use the zat’nik’tel. He could be useful, to persuade—“

                “I doubt that will be necessary.”

                The door shut, and there was silence. Young didn’t move, wondering if the room had cameras. The goa’uld on Earth meant the Trust. The SGC devoted some small resources to them, but what with the growing galactic power of the Lucian Alliance, the remnants of Ori worshippers, and the leftover plagues, infestations, and famines of the Priors, the Trust had been low priority. Young tested his bonds carefully, wishing belatedly that that hadn’t been the case. Plastic zip ties, he thought. Breakable with a little work.

                “You awake?” he whispered as quietly as he could. One of the other person’s boots moved very slightly. “You want to tell me the situation?”

                “Listen to me if you want to live,” the other scraped out: a woman’s voice, rough and wet as if she was in pain. Her accent smacked of the British Isles, but that was a quirk: Young could hear the underlying tones of someone who had grown up speaking a dialect nonnative to Earth. “Believe me when I say that our captors are like nothing you’ve seen before.” Young half wanted to laugh, but settled for sighing heavily.

                “I doubt that, now listen to _me_ , Lucian Alliance,” he gritted. He knew what all that tight black leather signaled, as much as black businesswear signaled the Trust, who were attached to upholding the renegade NID’s aesthetic. “I know this planet.” Young shifted his leg, flexed his knee. Sore, but usable.

                “I never thought I’d be glad to hear a Tau’ri say that,” she said, voice immensely relieved. “Stargate program?”

                “What else?” Young turned his head to see her more fully. She was facing him, hands bound the same way as his, and there was a large patch of blood at her shoulder. Long dark hair hung into her face. “Are you going to be able to break those ties?”

                “Yes,” she said tersely. Young considered.

                “How many of your people do you think they have?”

                “One.”

                “How many of them?”

                “At least six.”

                “Who else of your people is it that we are looking for, and what kind of shape are they in?”

                “Our programmer, she put up a fight but I don’t know how she’s doing now. What about _your_ people?” A programmer, and Rush. What the Trust wanted with them he couldn’t guess, but it was doubtless something evil.

                “No one who can fight, at least not the goa’uld,” he said. He was going to have to rely on adrenaline to get through the pain that was coming, and the pain that was currently here and curled firmly around his backbone. “They might need you alive to keep yours in line, but I’m just unneeded collateral.” He really hoped Rush was still alive, and not being tortured. “We need to act while both of us are alive.”

                “As soon as they come through the door,” she agreed.

                “How’s the shoulder?”

                “Manageable,” she said tersely. Young decided not to piss her off, and hoped she would live up to the rest of her people’s example. They were ruthless, skilled, and the only thing they hated more than the SGC was the goa’uld.

                He closed his eyes for a moment, wishing his head hurt just slightly less. Someone had got him squarely in the face in the office. He wished he knew where Rush was. At least they were still on Earth: the air had a distinct smell of concrete, old pesticide, dirt, a burned HVAC system, and mold that was immediately noticeable and distinct to basements on this planet. One step at a time: get free, then find Rush. He wished for Scott, Park, and Morris: the four of them had gotten out of plenty of tight spots. Right until the last one.

                “Right, I’m not waiting for them to come,” he said, and sat up, head rushing as his vision spotted out for a brief moment. “God knows what’s happening out there.” Rush could be gone, or hurt, or being forced to do something terrible.

                There _were_ cameras, because the door slammed open, a tall man storming in, a zat strapped to his thigh but undrawn. Young leapt to his feet, bringing his bound hands down hard against his back and bending his arms back, as fast as he could manage. There was a stinging sensation in his wrists, and his hands were free. He heard a cracking sound as the Lucian Alliance woman sprang up, freeing her hands.

                The pain in his head and back faded to almost nothing as he rushed forward, pushing in too close for weapons range, and got hold of the man’s face and the back of his head. He got a heavy punch in the stomach for his trouble, but twisted hard and the man dropped as he doubled over, breathless. The sound of a charging zat came from the door, and the thunk of a boot meeting metal and then a gagging sound. Young ripped the zat from the downed man to see the Lucian Alliance woman catching one she had no doubt kicked from her assailant’s hand. His blood was pounding, thrumming fast in his ears and hands and feet, and the two of them moved out of the door together, into a much wider, larger room.

                Rush was there, at a table with another woman in black, two suited men, one of them the one from the office, standing next to them. The only other woman--the goa’uld--and two more men were turning to the door, drawing sidearms.

                The sound of discharging zats and a pistol firing echoed off the walls, and Young ducked reflexively, narrowly missing a bolt of blue energy. One of the men had been hit with a zat blast, but he was already struggling to his feet. The woman fired twice more at him, then reached up to slam the edge of the weapon into the other’s head. Young was straightening when the goa’uld fired her zat, and he turned his movement into a forward roll, tackling her legs.

                She was wearing a formal business suit with a skirt, not combat gear nor the ornate but movable outfits the goa’uld usually favored, and her struggle to move gave Young time to drive his elbow hard into her stomach, then catch her hand as it came down at his head. She was strong, and his arm would hurt like hell for days, but he could twist her wrist back, so that the zat clattered to the floor. He rolled on top of her, slamming the back of his head into her face and snatching the zat up in time to fire at the approaching man, one of the two who had been guarding Rush and the other woman. He staggered, firing a gun. Young fired again, dropping him, registering the spray of dirt and concrete chips from the bullet’s impact to his left after it had dug into the side of his face.

                The goa’uld pinned under him got one hand around his neck and the other was reaching for his eyes, so Young rolled onto his stomach, away from her grip, kicking her in the legs and stomach as he went. He stood up, his right hip spasming so badly his leg gave out for a second. The other guard was on the floor with the Lucian Alliance programmer, and Rush was kneeling next to them, hopefully helping. Young couldn’t see what kind of shape either of them was in, but he had an angry goa’uld to fight and the other two seemed to be kicking the shit out of his ally.

                The goa’uld was back on her feet, zat gone, but a buzzing pain stick in her hand. Where the hell had she gotten that?

                “Surrender,” she ordered, eyes glowing, lunging forward. Young stumbled backwards, trying to get enough distance to fire. “Surrender and beg your god for mercy!” He fired twice, and she staggered and fell, then once more, to be sure. That was four out of seven.

                One of the woman’s attackers had stepped back slightly and was fiddling with a device. Young fired at him, twice, and he fell, eyes flashing gold as he did. God, he hoped they didn’t try to jump hosts. The two still fighting were too close together for him to get a shot off, so he jumped in and dragged the final man off, finding him half-strangled by his tie and clutching a short dagger that had gone partially into the woman’s abdomen, through the leather. She staggered on her feet, clutching her stomach, and went down on one knee.

                Young threw the man to the floor, slamming his head down twice, and then moved back enough to get him with the zat. That left one.

                He was still struggling with Rush and the other woman, who had been tied at the feet but not the hands. Rush had him by the ankles, and the woman had her head tucked down, keeping him in a chokehold while he clawed at her face and head. Young stepped heavily on his stomach, making him jerk, and dragged him upright. He was half-choked, and dropped with a punch to the temple.

                “Kiva!” The woman struggled to her hands and knees, looking to her compatriot, who had sunk into a sitting position. Young went back over to her, dragging the jacket off one of the Trust members and holding it out to her. The rush of the fight was going out of him, leaving him panting for breath and the tingles of new injuries starting to be felt. The throb in his back returned, building.

                “I’m fine, Ginn,” Kiva said, voice iron calm but still rough with pain. “Here,” she slid the knife over to the programmer—Ginn. She cut her legs free, and then Rush’s. Young looked over at him, trying to assess him beyond what he had seen in the midst of fighting. He had a graze over one cheekbone, and looked confused and frightened, but compared to the bruising on Ginn’s face, he looked well.

                “Rush,” he said, leaving Kiva to staunch the bleeding. “Are you okay?”

                “What the fuck is going on?” Rush snapped, in a tone of voice Young had never heard from him before: something between rage and terror, quiet to control shaking.

                “It’s a lot to explain,” he said, helping Rush to his feet, ignoring steadfastly the screaming in his back. He reached forward to touch Rush’s arm, reassuring himself. A wave of relief went through him to see that the other man could stand upright. God, they all four of them had gotten lucky. “Help me restrain these guys.”

                “Aren’t they _dead_?” Rush said, voice high, straightening the papers on the table without looking at them.

                “Some of them are just unconscious,” Young said. “Ginn, you help me.” The woman was crouching next to Kiva, pressing down on the folded jacket.

                “Give me one of their belts and then I’ll help you,” she said. “She’s badly wounded.” Rush ran his hands through his hair, not moving. Young stripped the bodies of their weapons, checking pulses as he crouched, trying to avoid bending his back too much. Three of them were just unconscious.

                There was an assortment of crates at the far edge of the room, and Young opened several until he found the package of hardware store zip ties. Ginn was binding up Kiva’s wound, face tight and pained, one eye started to swell shut.

                “What’s this?” Rush leaned over to pick up the device that one of Kiva’s attackers had been holding. It was gold and black, smooth old metal and cheap plastic with a short antenna, a hybrid radio of some kind. A small red light blinked at the top.

                “They brought us by al’kesh and then cargo ship,” Kiva said. There was probably some kind of subspace transponder in the device. There could be an al’kesh coming down for them right now. Shit. Young felt the last of the adrenaline drain from him, dulling his thoughts with pain.

                “Can you open that up and pull out the crystals?” he asked Rush, who gave him a look, but then set to prying it open. His hands were trembling, but they steadied as he worked at it.

                “Explain,” he said tersely, as Young pulled a cell phone from the jacket of the female goa’uld.

                “Let me deal with the situation first,” he said. “And get us out of danger.” Rush gave him a look, but didn’t say anything. He restrained the remaining Trust members, which made the pain in his knee flare up and race up his back as he slowly dragged them together. Rush opened the back of the transponder and flicked out three little blue crystals, which pinged onto the floor. The red indicator light at the top went out.

                Young dialed Homeworld Command.


	11. Chapter 11

                Young wanted to sink into one of the chairs in the room, as Rush had done, but he couldn’t. He had two people who would be happy to kill him only mildly incapacitated, and three more tied up, and more undoubtedly on the way. He had to resolve this situation.

                Dispatch picked up.

                “This is Everett Young,” he said. “Scramble SG teams and get on tracking this signal, we’ve got a Trust cell.”

                “Colonel _Young_?” the soldier on the other end of the line asked.

                “We have to clear out of this location.” He cut his gaze over to Kiva and Ginn: Kiva was sitting up, zat still open and eyes harsh. “I have two Lucian Alliance personnel with me, and Nicholas Rush, Sam Carter’s contact. Call _her_.” He ended the call, looking over at the files on the table. He recognized the green folders of the SGC, and Rush continued to stack them up, glancing through them. “What are those?”

                “Schematics and puzzles,” Ginn said. “They had many collected.”

                “We need to get away from here,” Young said. Kiva nodded, and Ginn dragged her to her feet.

                “There are likely to be guards outside,” she said, readjusting her grip on her zat. Ginn had picked one up too. Young handed his to Rush, who took it with a dubious look.

                “One shot stuns, two shots kill.” Rush aimed it carefully at the floor.

                “How do you know this?” He cast a look at the transponder and its crystals. “What is that, it looks very old, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

                “I’ve got point,” Young said, sticking the pistol from one of the downed men in his belt after switching on the safety, and taking up another zat. “Rush, stay right behind me.” Rush shoved the files into a metal case, snapping it shut and picking it up.

                “If more of those people are coming back, it doesn’t make sense to leave this for them, does it?” he asked, jutting his chin forward aggressively in response to Young’s glance.

                There was another door, which led to a narrow, creaking staircase. Young padded up, wincing at the sound Rush’s untrained feet made behind him, and the scuffing of Kiva, who was somehow walking with Ginn’s help. He put his fist up, and opened the door at the top of the stairs, unsurprised to find himself in an alleyway, with a man lounging outside the door, smoking a cigarette. Young fired the zat with a silent plea that no one hear it, and then felt around inside his pockets until he found a set of keys. Rush and the others emerged from the door, Rush lowering his zat and letting it click closed. Kiva leaned up against the wall.

                “Do you know where we are?” The air didn’t smell too different from the way it smelled at his apartment, but it was night.

                “A little ways outside San Francisco,” Rush said. He paced a few steps away and came back to face Young. “What the hell is this?” He gestured to the weapon in his hand, the building behind him, the two Lucian Alliance women against the wall. “I was just woken with an electrical shock, which hurt a _lot_ , and then got two more for asking questions! You, _answer me_!” He pointed a demanding finger at Young, eyes fierce.

                Young cringed internally at the image that unfolded in his mind, of Rush’s thin frame arching back in agonized tension at the touch of the pain stick.

                “Rush, I _will_ ,” he said seriously. “But wait ten goddamn minutes while I try to save your life.” The Trust often wired their hideouts with explosives, in case of discovery. He didn’t want to stay near this building. The car keys he’d stolen must belong to the black SUV parked in the alley. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and wished he could remember Sam Carter’s number from memory. His phone was gone, along with his wallet and keys, probably in a case down in the basement they’d just come from.

                He redialed Stargate Command.

                “Young again.” The line clicked, and then Cam was shouting in his ear.

                “Everett, what the hell is going on?”

                “We’re in San Francisco still,” he said, deciding that this information would not be new to any Trust operatives listening in from orbit. “I’ve got good reason to think that we might get a visit from the skies soon, so we need to get the hell away from here.” Out of the corner of his eye, Rush was pacing angrily and Kiva was visibly having trouble keeping her weapon up.

                “We’re coming, we’re leaving from Peterson now, give us an hour.” The line switched back to dispatch.

                “Colonel, are the Lucian Alliance personnel with you prisoners?” Young looked over at Kiva, who was grey and barely on her feet, even with the help of the wall.

                “They can be,” he said. “I think I’ve got us a vehicle, give me a moment.”

                The doors of the SUV unlocked with a click when he tried the key remote. Kiva and Ginn stumbled forward, and Young helped her into the backseat, letting Ginn follow her and adjust the seatbelt to add pressure on the wound. Then he raised his zat and fired at Kiva, making Ginn shriek and cringe away and Rush leap back from the car. Kiva’s head sagged backwards onto the headrest, hands going slack. Young took the zat from her hands and closed it.

                “Don’t even think about it,” he growled at Ginn. “Disarm that and toss it in the front, then buckle up.” Face pale, Ginn collapsed her zat and tossed it forward.

                “What the hell did you just do?” Rush sounded furious, his voice low.

                “I just incapacitated a terrorist so I don’t have to worry about being stabbed while I try to drive. Get in the front seat.” Rush looked as if he was seriously refusing to do so. Young closed his eyes for a moment, tried to relax his posture. “Please.”

                Rush did so, watching him all the while, and Young climbed into the driver’s seat, relieved to see it had automatic transmission. He started the engine, backed carefully into the street, and drove east and north, not exceeding the speed limit.

                “You going to give me that explanation?” Rush asked, with a tone that suggested he doubted it. Young glanced in the mirror. Ginn had her arms folded, but hadn’t moved.

                “What did they tell you?”

                “That woman you killed called herself a god and electrocuted me.” Rush pushed his hand into his hair, resting his elbow on the door. “I think just on principle.”

                “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.” Young took a breath. “There is life on other planets. Intelligent life. We’ve seen it, fought it sometimes.” Rush stayed quiet, face drawn into a frown when Young glanced over for a moment. “I’ve been to other solar systems and another galaxy.”

                “The distance between stars—“

                “Manageable with wormholes and hyperdrives.”

                “You’re telling me the truth?” Rush was speaking in a tone that was typically reserved for people who were delusional and dangerous, to keep them calm.

                “I don’t doubt that you’ll get to see.” The phone in Young’s pocket rang, the display flashing up Cam’s number.

                “Us and SG-5 are on the ground, we basically ruined a golf course when we landed.”

                “Good,” Young said, relieved beyond words, something easing slightly in his chest. “We’re moving away from the site, but if you got our location from the last two calls—“

                “Yeah, SG-5 are on their way. Who do you have with you?”

                “Wounded Lucian Alliance operative, name of Kiva, and another named Ginn. One of Carter’s outside consultants, Dr. Nicholas Rush.”

                “Kiva?” Cam said sharply.

                “Yeah, she’s gonna need a medevac into the city and a surgeon who can keep quiet.”

                “We’re going to meet up with you, we’re tracking that phone now, just keep going east.” Young set the phone down but didn’t hang up, looking back in the mirror once more. No one was following them, as far as he could tell. Ginn’s face was pale and still and miserable in the mirror.

                “What did they want from you?” Young asked. Rush shook his head.

                “Something about us building some device for them,” he said shortly, shifting in his seat. Young looked over at him, to see his leg shaking and his hand trembling. He wanted to reach over and clap him on the shoulder, but didn’t. He had a feeling that Rush might flinch away, and he didn’t want that.

                “We had some of the plans from the SGC, but we didn’t think it was for anything important,” Ginn said from the backseat. “The rest they had from Dr. Rush.” She made a spitting noise. “Their leader was Athena: she kept talking about Anubis.” Her voice held a trace of fear that sent an answering thrill of dread down Young’s neck.

                “Who did you get the SGC plans from?” Young asked, and she didn’t say anything further. He turned back to Rush. “Stargate Command will show you everything. I think Carter will probably come down herself.” Carter would feel terrible about this whole situation, though she couldn’t be responsible for the Trust knowing that Rush had files from her.

                “God,” Rush said, voice on the edge of hysterical, and turned to stare out of the window. Young left him to his thoughts, until he heard Cam yell into the phone again. He picked it up.

                “Yeah.”

                “We’re coming up on you.” Young grunted in acknowledgement, not wanting to provoke Ginn into something like diving out of the vehicle, and continued on at the same pace. In less than five minutes, he saw a red Lexus pull a U-turn immediately after he passed, and then follow them.

                “It’s us,” Cam’s voice said, and the line went dead. Young flicked his blinker on and turned off onto a side street, into the parking lot of a little strip mall full of closed shops. He kept the engine running until the other car stopped and three familiar figures stepped out, dressed in black fatigues, and approached the SUV. Young killed the engine and looked over at Rush once more, his face illuminated as the light in the roof of the car turned on.

                “I’m sorry for this.” He didn’t know how to articulate the brief sense of dread that he’d had in the beginning of the semester, that it would be a shame for Carter or Telford to drag Rush into the program. Rush gave him a long look, face serious and unreadable.

                “It seems I need to revise my opinion of you,” he said, looking away, running his hands through his hair once more. Young opened the door and began the process of unlocking his spine enough to stand and get out, watching SG-1 cuff Ginn, carry Kiva out of the backseat, and break out a first aid kit. He stepped onto the ground with a rush of agony up his back and hip that reminded him of seven months ago, but he felt, for the moment, safe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It may be time to list this as an SG-1 crossover, I'm not sure.


	12. Chapter 12

                Ginn was taken away with an icepack for her eye, cuffed and leg-chained in the back of an Air Force vehicle, flanked by two stone-faced young lieutenants. Kiva, as far as he could tell, had been taken to the nearest hospital. Teal’c had gone with her, and apparently that was where Dr. Lam was headed now. Young and Rush had been left with their stolen SUV, SG-1’s commandeered red sports car, and the remains of SG-1: Cam and Vala. Daniel, apparently, was off-world at a dig.

                He had introduced Rush to them as they got out of the vehicle: he had looked askance at them, eyeing Teal’c’s forehead tattoo, Vala’s incongruous ponytails, and even Cam’s perfect soldier’s posture as if trying to see past them. Then he had sort of buckled at the knees for a second, and Young had half-caught him, staggering, and Cam had to rush forward and steady them both.

                “We’ve got a jet, let’s go,” Cam said, gesturing to the Lexus. He made Young get into the front seat, though nothing at this point could have made him feel better. Rush was back upright and snarling at Vala, who was baiting him by telling him the truth in her insincere voice as she waited for him to get into the backseat.

                “Rush,” Young said. “Please get in the car, we’re going somewhere safe.” Rush narrowed his eyes at him.

                “No, I want an explanation now before I go anywhere! I’ve been kidnapped once already today, if you’ve forgotten.” He tossed his head back with a jerk, his posture resolving into something hunted yet resolute. Young considered. He probably deserved it.

                “I told you the truth,” he said slowly. “I really did. If you want understandable proof of aliens and space travel, you’re going to have to come with us.” He paused. “You were curious, remember, about why a cryptographer would need to solve problems for someone working on deep-space radar telemetry? Now’s your chance to find out.” Rush met his eyes, searching them as if he could find Young’s honesty in them. Perhaps he could. Either way, he tsked out a breath and all but flung himself into the back seat.

                Young spent the drive and subsequent flight half in a daze of pain, swallowing a higher-than-recommended dose of ibuprofen from the first aid kit in Vala’s pack to get through the bumps. Rush was still holding the case of files, and was going over them in the backseat with a pen, for some reason.

                They drove from Peterson to Cheyenne Mountain, giving Rush enough time to receive a call from what sounded like a very apologetic Sam Carter. Young was too exhausted and pained to turn more than a sliver of his attention towards Rush, but he seemed to be either calm or holding his frustration inside. It was turning into the early morning, the familiar desert sun rising in the colder air of Colorado as they drove towards Cheyenne Mountain.

~

                Everything currently felt moderately surreal to Young. He was in the Cheyenne Mountain infirmary, lying on a cot while Dr. Brightman developed his X-rays. The sensation of desperately wanting to be in a shower instead of waiting in the infirmary was so familiar it was unnerving. Dr. Rush was sitting up in a bed to his left, and he had refused to lie down. He was staring around at the infirmary, and Young had a suspicion that he was looking for more high-tech things to stare at. He was rubbing at his shoulder with one hand, long hair wild.

                “What did Carter say to you?” he asked.

                “She’s coming down from Washington,” Rush said. He looked exhausted.

                “That pain stick hurts like hell,” Young said, watching him rub his shoulder again. “Come here.” Rush, with a glance at the airman standing by the infirmary door, didn’t move. “Come on, I can’t really stand.” He walked over. Young stretched his arms, which felt fine. His wrists were a little sore, maybe. “There’s a trick to it.” He sat up, feeling a fine sweat break out over his back when his weight shifted onto his spine and hip.

                “To what?” Young patted the side of the bed. Rush raised an eyebrow.

                “Be in agony then,” he challenged. Rush rolled his shoulders, then sat next to him, with an air of reluctance. Young felt the prickles of awkwardness from the day before settle in, and dismissed the conscious thought of a forming suspicion. He put one hand carefully on each side of Rush’s neck, then dug his thumbs in, quite a bit harder than the typical shoulder rub usually required. He felt the knots deep in Rush’s shoulder smooth somewhat.

                “Christ, that hurts,” Rush growled. “What the fuck are you doing?”

                “Did you have back tension before you were tortured by electrocution?” Young said, running his fingers along Rush’s shoulders. They were rock hard. “This is pretty bad.” The palms of his hands felt surprisingly sensitive, heat racing up his arms from where his hands rested over the sharp planes of Rush’s shoulders. He dug his fingers in again, trying to banish the feeling.

                “I have a stressful life,” Rush snapped, standing up. “This isn’t helping.” Young shrugged.

                “Okay,” he said. Maybe he could get some sleep. He closed his eyes, but before he could even enjoy that, Dr. Brightman’s shoes announced her presence, and he opened them reluctantly.

                “No further bone damage,” she said, not bothering to lead with any pleasantries. “Some bruising, but mostly a lot of muscle strain that is pinching the damaged nerve.”

                “So I can stand,” Young said, working to swing his legs off the bed. Brightman tilted her head.

                “Be careful, just because you don’t have bone trauma doesn’t mean you should go aggravating your nerves.” Young ignored her, leaning forward and stretching his back out. Fuck, that hurt a lot. He got to his feet slowly, seeing two replicas of his crutches at the side of the cot. He hated the sight of them, but he grabbed them anyway. At this point, he wanted a shower more than his pride.

                “Where are you going?”

                “Shower,” he snapped. Brightman didn’t say anything else.

                The shower for the infirmary was equipped with a rail, which Young had to use while he one-handedly shampooed and washed. It was worth the work, though, because even though he couldn’t shave, he at least didn’t smell like a basement gunfight anymore. Finding his size in the pile of unmarked fatigues to choose from wasn’t difficult, and he re-emerged to see Lisa and Scott sitting in the infirmary, talking earnestly with Rush.

                “Colonel,” Lisa said, and rushed towards him, skidding to a stop and giving him a cautious hug. Scott saluted; Young noted the double bars embroidered on his jacket.

                “Congratulations, Captain,” he said, and Scott grinned self-consciously. Lisa was dressed for going offworld, her hair pulled back and up.

                “We’re so relieved to hear you’re alright, sir,” Scott said. “And, uh, Dr. Rush as well.” Young saw Rush twist his mouth ironically at Scott’s attempt at friendliness. “Hey, Park, give him the news.” He shoved her gently, and she flushed with happiness.

                “I’m engaged,” she said, and showed him a silver band on her left hand. Young felt a pang, at the thought that if he were still at the SGC, he would have heard the day it happened, and gone to celebrate with the rest of the team.

                “Who’s the lucky guy?” he asked.

                “Ronald Greer,” she said. “He just got assigned to SG-15.” The name was familiar: he recalled a strong-jawed young man, probably five years younger than Lisa, with a lot of guts and the occasional trouble with insubordination.

                “Well, congratulations,” he said, and meant it. Lisa’s eyes were shining with happiness, and she deserved some.

                “We’ve got to get down to the gate room,” Scott said, and the two of them bid him and Rush goodbye, hurrying out the door and straightening their caps. He wondered who was in charge of SG-10 now.

                “Apparently Dr. Park came through the UC system,” Rush said. Young couldn’t remember a single thing about where Lisa had gone to school: it had never been especially relevant. The scientists and other civilians sometimes had ping pong matches that involved college rivalries, but the military personnel rarely ventured into those parties.

                “I don’t know,” he said. “She’s saved my life a few times, so that kind of renders academic background irrelevant to my opinion of her.” Rush raised his eyebrows. “We have a briefing with General Carter and some other people, and you can get your real explanation, if you want to head down to the briefing room.” Rush got to his feet, and crossed his arms in front of himself.

                “Thank you for getting us out of that situation,” he said, meeting Young’s eyes for a fleeting second. “It wasn’t something I could have done myself.” Young directed his eyes to the floor, oddly self-conscious.

                “Well, it’s my job,” he said, and indicated the infirmary doors. “Shall we?”

                As soon as they entered the briefing room, with the arc of the gate visible through the glass window, Rush hurried to stare out at the gate room. Young stood back a little: the grey cement, generators, assault rifle toting Marines, and the harsh utilitarianism of the whole edifice made his heart ache. He could see the backs of Lisa, Scott, and the two new members of SG-10 standing at the base of the ramp.

                “They’re going to dial any moment,” he said. “Sam Carter wrote the program that does it.” He was going to enjoy the look on Rush’s face when he saw the gate dial. He had been there for Lisa’s first time, and she had started crying in amazement, hands pressed over a wide smile.

                “What do you mean?” Rush asked, just as the orange chevrons lit up, and the rasp of the gate turning began. His eyes snapped back to it, going wide behind his dirty glasses. He stood there, arms folded, as the gate turned through the first six chevrons. Young kept the gate in the corner of his eye, and when the blue-white spray of the forming wormhole exploded outward from the gate, Rush started and jerked back visibly. It settled into the gentle blue of the event horizon.

                “Amazing,” he heard Rush breathe out.

                “Believe me about the wormholes now?” Young said, pulling out a chair and sitting carefully. There was a huge pot of coffee at the side table, and he reached over and poured himself a cup.

                “Just walk right through,” Rush said vaguely, and then the light from the gate went out with a muffled sound. Young poured him a cup as well, and wanted to smile as he sat down and took it without a word, eyes looking into the distance. Young added a liberal amount of milk to his cup: unless the SGC coffee had improved markedly since he was last here, this was a necessary step.

                The briefing room door opened to General Landry, General Carter, Cam, and Daniel Jackson. Teal’c and Vala were nowhere to be seen. A scrum formed immediately around the coffee pot. Carter escaped first, gulping hers down like water. She was in fatigues, apparently called up to be ready for anything.

                “Dr. Rush,” she said. His eyes snapped back to focus.

                “You’re responsible for that?” He pointed out to the gate room. Carter blinked.

                “Uh, well, kind of, I wrote the program that makes it dial.” Rush sipped his coffee and wrinkled his nose.

                “So who designed that device?”

                “That’s where the aliens come in,” Young said. “It’s a long story.”

                The rest of SG-1’s present members sat down and General Landry called them to order, then passed Rush a file.

                “I’m sorry you had to be introduced to the SGC like this,” he said. “I’m going to let General Carter and Dr. Jackson give you a brief history of this place, just to let you know what’s going on.”

                To his credit, Rush stayed sharp through the hour it took Carter and Jackson to get him up to speed. Neither of them balked at his asking questions, and Carter scribbled several complicated bits of math down on pieces of paper at intermittent times. He looked exhausted, his eyes sunk deep in his face, and after the explanation of the Trust, Jackson raised a hand.

                “Colonel Young and Dr. Rush have been awake for a long time,” he said. “We could take a short break, let them rest while I look through what they recovered from the Trust more carefully.”

                “Didn’t you say you were an archaeologist?” Rush managed to bite out at him. “It was all technical drawings and physics.” Daniel just leaned back in his chair and smiled slightly, not bothering to be offended.

                “I’ve done my share of things unreasonably far afield of my expertise,” he said mildly. “But I had a chance to look at them, and I’ve seen them before. Some of them were originally my files, in fact.” Rush didn’t say anything further, and looked over at Carter.

                “I’d prefer to keep speaking with General Carter,” he said.

                “An hour break,” Landry said. “There’s food in the commissary. We don’t have time for anything more extended, Dr. Jackson. As you said, some of those files were yours.” Young wondered if SG-1 and Landry and Carter knew who it was or how it had happened. They could dismiss him and Rush from the rest of the proceedings: the program had been disclosed to him, and the rest of the mission might not be. This was how it felt to have an accidental run-in with alien tech or aliens: a traumatic experience, a small explanation, and someone else took care of the problem. Young had never been on this side of it before and found he preferred to be the man with the gun, taking care of the problem.

                Young took Rush to the commissary, Sam Carter promising to catch up with them in “a moment.” He got a plateful of eggs, bacon, and cornbread, then another cup of coffee, and when Rush sat down next to him, his plate was similarly full. The man ate like he didn’t even taste his food, and Young thought that it was excusable in this case, considering what was on his mind.

                “How are you holding up?” he asked. Rush swallowed a mouthful of eggs and tilted his head.

                “I’m looking forward to modeling the gate address system, both the Milky Way and Pegasus,” he said. “The Ancient designations aren’t as intuitive as they might be, and there must be a reason.” Young blinked.

                “I was referring to your reaction to the existence of aliens,” he clarified, wondering at Rush’s immediate answer to his question. Rush gulped down some of his coffee.

                “Well, it’s terrifying, quite frankly, but I’m glad I know now.”

                “That’s how I felt,” Young said, remembering his transfer from Bosnia to a classified program at Cheyenne Mountain and feeling the weight of a new and different responsibility settle onto his shoulders. The unorthodox squad system of the gate teams, the mission to learn and protect rather than aggress—they had all been very different. He had been taken from the first day, though, and though he had a variety of regrets surrounding his time here, being here at all would never be one.

                “When did you join?”

                “Ninety-seven, right at the start,” he said. “It was smaller, less practiced, but in a lot of ways, less dangerous as well.” Rush snorted and finished his coffee, shaking his hair back. “Do you want a shower? Locker rooms are close, I can find you some clothes.”

                Rush inspected his jacket and jeans as if he had not even noticed their dirty state until Young had pointed it out. His hair, which was usually quite fine and fluffy-looking, was clumped to itself and visibly greasy.

                “Perhaps that would be good,” he admitted. “At the very least, it’d wake me up.” He looked into his empty coffee cup balefully.

                While Rush disappeared into the showers, Young snagged a t-shirt and jacket from SG-10’s stack: the jacket, he was fairly certain, used to be his, but it would fit Rush well enough. Finding him pants that wouldn’t be completely overlarge was a different matter: Rush was thin and short, and while Young didn’t have the height that Cam or Scott did, he was far bulkier. Eventually, though, he had a full complement of clothing to leave next to the only stall that was running.

                When Rush emerged from the lockers, he looked decidedly odd to Young in the fatigue trousers and a slightly-too-large t-shirt, but much cleaner. The jacket was slung over his shoulder. Young had never seen him in short sleeves before, and for a second he was surprised and captivated at the sight of his arms, which were heavier and stronger-looking than he’d expected. He had a moment of breathlessness and heat as he had in the infirmary, working knots out of Rush’s shoulders, and had to hurry away on his crutches, claiming a need to use the bathroom.

                He splashed water on his face, trying to calm down. This didn’t necessarily mean anything, just that he was shaken and grateful that Rush was alive and well, and full of endorphins, and exhausted to boot. A flash of attraction was just happiness, misfiring in his brain. He pushed it from his mind, and came out to lead Rush back to the briefing room, ignoring the skipping-up of his heartbeat and an unwanted craving itching in his hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ugh, this took forever, I hope it lives up to hopes!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the infodumping nature of this chapter. It's hard to strike a balance between boring people who are familiar with SG-1 and don't want a rehash of what happened there and totally confusing people who are only familiar with SGU. Hopefully there won't be many more like this one. (I honestly didn't mean to write a crossover, it just happened).  
> Also, sorry about the long wait, I had to rewrite and cut chunks of this one several times.

                There were more files on the table in the briefing room when they walked back in. Young sat down slowly, leaned his crutches on the table, and drew the closest towards him. Except for the plain green and tan folders they were in, they seemed extremely varied. Photographs of Ancient wall carvings, reports from Lucian Alliance infiltration missions, scans of what looked like Jackson’s field notes, and detailed engineering notes all comprised some portion of the pile. Rush pulled some of them towards himself as Carter, Jackson, Landry, and Cam reentered. Vala was with them, dressed in her black field fatigues, hair braided back and twisted behind her head: as she pulled out a chair and sat down, she pulled it out of the bun and started undoing the braid. Landry closed the blinds over the window and locked the door before he sat down.

                “Vala took care of Ginn’s interrogation,” Jackson said, leafing through some of the notes himself and seeming disgruntled about that. Cam didn’t look pleased either, though Carter, Landry, and Vala were all blank-faced. Young wondered whose idea it was for Vala to do the interrogation. He tried to imagine being questioned by someone who would seem innately sympathetic and terrifying at once; it must have been Landry or Vala’s idea, none of the others were that devious.

                “Ginn,” Vala said slowly, “was very helpful. The leak that let the Lucian Alliance get their hands on Daniel’s files, and then Samantha’s notes, is someone on a gate team.” Jackson leaned forward, pulling a few things together and handing them to Rush.

                “Is this what they wanted you to put together?” he asked. Young, seated next to Rush, saw a detailed sketch of Merlin’s weapon. The flattened curves of the base, the arches springing up from it: he had seen enough representations of the thing to recognize it immediately.

                “Perhaps,” he replied. “But I can’t say for sure. There were definitely similarities. What is it?” Jackson folded his hands on the table and looked around.

                “That’s not good,” he said. “What interest does the Trust have in anti-Ascended weaponry?” Vala finished undoing her braid and sat more upright as Young’s mind started turning over the comments from Ginn. Athena. Athena, and she mentioned…

                “Anubis,” Vala said. “With the Ori out of the way, the goa’uld have a chance. But they’re scattered.” Young felt understanding turn cold and heavy in his stomach.

                “They want a leader who can bring them together,” he said. He looked over at Rush. “Anubis—“ Rush waved him off, and he didn’t continue.

                “I remember that, it was a common name in Dr. Carter and Dr. Jackson’s story.”

                “Anubis is currently locked in battle with Oma Desala, the same way that Morgan le Fey is battling Adria,” General Carter stumbled over the last word for a second, but Young could see grim realization on her face. “The Sangraal, the anti-Ascended weapon, works in a manner similar to an interfering wave.” She turned her attention to Rush, who watched her intently. Young, who had been the recipient of his focus a few times, watched, and found the look on his face a lot more, well, attractive, than he remembered. Carter didn’t seem to notice at all, and he forced himself to listen to her and push aside the fearful clamoring in the back of his mind. That could wait.

                “The Ascended being’s energy of consciousness flattens to nothing. We think.” She indicated the sketch of Merlin’s weapon, and Young remembered frantic missions about two years ago, to dig up ruins for traces of the thing, with no success. In the end, it hadn’t mattered, because Jackson had finished the thing, and they’d been redirected to do damage control on Alliance-controlled planets after the Ori defeat.

                “Anubis never ascended fully,” Jackson picked up from Carter. “His physical body has been destroyed, but there are places he could return to. Places the Trust have probably arranged for him.”

                “Anyway,” Carter said. “Since he’s not ascended the same way as the rest of them, the ascended portion, or wave, or whatever you want to call it, would be freed from Oma and allowed to wander, exerting his powers without incurring the wrath of the rest of the Ascended, who would all be dead.”

                Young sipped silently at his coffee. He doubted the Trust would ever succeed, not without Merlin’s weapon, which had needed special components and the overwriting of Jackson’s brain and Merlin’s own assistance. Not unless they found the thing, floating somewhere in the vastness of space in the Ori galaxy. But they were still trying, and the thought of Anubis being free again, this time to use his ascension powers, with impunity, made him feel sick.

                “Thanks to Everett, we put a big hole in their plans, if not an insurmountable setback,” Cam said, raising his coffee cup towards Young. He ducked his head as the rest of the table nodded at him, Rush just staring. Landry cleared his throat and nodded at Vala.

                “Ginn never got a good look at the Lucian Alliance’s SGC contact, but clearly a leak from the SGC to the Alliance is more immediately dangerous than some of that leaked material falling into the hands of part of the Trust.” Rush snorted at her words, and she flashed him a pained smile. “Institutionally, of course.”

                “I agree,” Landry said. “So what does Ginn know?”

                “That their contact has one of those goa’uld communication devices, he contacts them on different worlds, and that he has a lot of mobility and lack of accountability while in the field that comes with being an SG team leader. That’s all.” Vala ran her fingers through her fully loosened hair and tossed it back over her shoulders.

                “I would think a military team, where individuals are often alone, is more likely. I spoke with Kiva for all of a few moments and I don’t think anyone not military could have handled working with her for long,” Young said. Cam half laughed at his words.

                “That’s an understatement. I had a run-in with her father, Masim, one of Netan’s seconds. They’re all brutal.”

                “You think I don’t know?” Young said, a little irritated, and pointed to his crutches. Cam made an apologetic face after freezing for a moment, and he relaxed.

                “How did either these people or the Trust know who I was and decide to come after me?” Rush said sharply, cutting into the conversation. “General Carter is the only one who contacted me from this organization.”

                “My files on the preliminary work you did have your name on them,” Carter said. “Anyone with access to the engineering labs could have read that and communicated it to the Alliance.” Young watched Cam’s face harden into something like rock, his eyes blue points of angry ice, at Carter’s words.

                “I don’t know if that girl would stand up well to torture,” Vala said, her silvery eyes guarded and tired. “She’s their programmer, so if anyone would have remembered your name, she would have. I think Kiva, by reputation, would never give up anything to the goa’uld, for any reason, but Ginn: she was recruited forcibly, though she seems fond of Kiva. She’s not a hardened fighter.”

                Fond, Young thought, was not something anyone should be for an Alliance commander. Kiva had been a competent and fearless fighter in their lucky break, but he had a hard time imagining anyone being fond of her.

                “So we’re looking for someone who’s accessed that set of General Carter’s notes since five months ago. Who is likely a gate team leader, and has definitely been offworld the days Ginn can tell us,” Landry said succinctly.

                “A lot of people,” Carter said. “But I can get the logs easily.” Landry waved a hand.

                “I’ll put one of the new computer geeks on it, there’s no need for you to do it yourself.” He looked balefully at the pile of files on the table. “I guess the Trust issue has to be shelved, though the NID will be glad to hear about Athena being dead.”

                “Yeah,” Cam said. “Think you’ll get a nice note from them, Everett?” Young huffed out a breath.

                “Sure,” he said.

                “Stay on base, both of you, for the day,” Carter said. “I need to talk with Dr. Rush and you need to rest, Everett.”

                “SG-1, you’re on this leak,” Landry said. “Fix it, soon.” He looked over at Young and Rush. “You two, sleep for the love of God.”

                Young didn’t need telling twice. He knew where to get key cards to quarters, though all that was currently available for them, thanks to the nature of the emergency, was an isolation room next door to Ginn’s. A pair of Airmen were standing outside it: Becker and Dunning. Young recalled Dunning’s face dimly, and both of them saluted him as he unlocked the other door. He fought down irritation that was probably a result of his exhaustion.

                “You see any wings on this jacket?” He didn’t wait for an answer and walked inside, Rush following him. Typical isolation room: desk, chairs, three narrow beds, and a table with a lamp. A few paperbacks graced the desk, leftover from someone’s stint under the influence of something or other.

                “Not bad,” he said, turning the lamp on and switching off the overhead fluorescent lights. He took the bed closest to the door, sat down, and untied his boots, tugging them off while he did. The very act of sitting down on a bed had his eyes drooping, and he got off before he laid down all the way was his jacket.

                He woke, briefly, to the sound of the door opening and closing, but his eyes closed again.

                The second time, he felt more rested: disoriented about the time of day, but wakeful. The door was partially open, and he could hear two voices outside. He paused to listen. Rush and Carter.

                “I’m sure I could get a card to another door if you’d rather be alone,” Carter was saying quietly.

                “It’s fine,” Rush responded. “He doesn’t snore, and I’m still dead tired.” Carter made a small, amused ‘huh,’ and then Young heard Rush’s footsteps coming into the room, the door closing behind him. He blinked his eyes open, but the room was almost fully dark. Rush was holding a flashlight directed at the floor.

                “Glad to hear I don’t snore,” he said, and grimaced. His mouth tasted like he’d drunk bad coffee and gone to sleep, which he had. Rush started, and the flashlight’s beam was in his face. “Hey.”

                “Right, sorry.” The light shifted to the side. “You surprised me.”

                “What the hell time is it?” He could probably sleep more.

                “Three in the afternoon Colorado time.”

                “You had a meeting with Carter already?”

                “I took a nap first.” Rush’s voice was dry, and Young heard him sit down on the other bed.

                “So what did you decide?” he asked, suddenly feeling a knot of trepidation in his stomach. A tenuous offer of his friendship wouldn’t be enough to keep Rush in California.

                “About what?”

                “The program,” he growled irritably. “Are you joining?” There was a long pause, and he turned in the bed, trying to squint across the room to see Rush’s face. The light was insufficient, though, the beam of the flashlight pointed to the wall, away from them both.

                “I’ve no idea,” he said. “It was more of an explanatory meeting of what she was using my work for, not a recruitment.”

                “Oh,” he said, feeling relieved, and turned back to stare at the black ceiling. That was reassuring, though really perhaps it shouldn’t be. He remembered his earlier moment, looking at Rush as if he was seeing him for the first time, or seeing something in him for the first time. The craving in his hands had abated during the business of the meeting but was flaring up again as he thought about it. He definitely did not need this. “Wake me up in time for dinner, will you?”

                “Yeah,” Rush said, something amused and insincere in his voice, that Young recognized from bantering with him during office hours. He liked the tone, actually, now, liked it a lot. “Yeah, fine.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, hopefully the next one will come sooner!

                Rush shook him awake a few hours later, in time for dinner in the commissary with most of SG-1. Teal’c was there at last, having arrived with Kiva and Dr. Lam from a San Francisco hospital. SG-1 was in full banter mode, dark circles under their eyes to a member.

                “It seems unlikely she will be a good source of information about her contact within the SGC,” Teal’c was saying, presumably about Kiva. Vala raised her eyebrows.

                “No, not unless you set aside your picky rules on torture,” she said, and Young watched as Jackson and Cam both flicked glares over to her. They were predictable that way, even when Vala was clearly joking. Rush looked bored; he hadn’t shaved and his lack of glasses combined with the scruff made him look less professorial than Young was used to. He kind of liked it, he thought: it drew the eye to the sharp edges of the man.

                He tuned back in to Daniel and Vala’s exhausting verbal sparring for a few minutes, then gave up, ignoring Teal’c and Cam’s occasional input.

                “What are you going to do?” he asked Rush. He drummed his fingers on the table for a second.

                “I’m safe again, and I have grades to enter,” he said. “I expect a great deal of NDAs will have to be signed but I’ll be back at Berkeley for the next semester. There’s no one else to teach the upper level cryptography courses.”

                “But you’d rather stay here,” Young said, and took a sip of water to avoid looking at him.

                “Who wouldn’t?” Rush’s mouth flattened. “Aside from the obvious danger.”

                “I’m sure General Carter will get you a position,” he said, even though there was something cold in his chest at Rush’s frank admission that he wanted to leave California, or at least come to Cheyenne Mountain.

                “Why did you leave?” Rush asked. Young felt his face fold into something guarded and angry, thinking of Camile Wray’s heels clicking on the floor as she paced at the foot of his bed and laid out her demands. Before he had to choose whether to answer or to tell Rush it was none of his business, Cam snapped his fingers in front of his nose.

                “Everett, are you listening? I have a thought, but let’s meet in Jackson’s office instead of in the open.” Young nodded.

                “Okay.”

                Jackson’s office was crammed with books, various archaeological accoutrements, even more stone tablets than he remembered, and, thankfully, an empty bench and chairs. Cam slapped down four files.

                “Here are all the SG team leaders who looked through Carter’s files, don’t oversee civilians, and were offworld since then on Alliance controlled planets.” He folded his arms. “Four potential moles.” Jackson picked up the first file and opened it.

                “Colonel Reynolds, SG-3.” He set it aside, choosing the next one. “Colonel Dixon, SG-13. Colonel Telford, SG-8. General Carter, Pentagon.”

                Young swallowed, looked down at his hands. Holy shit. Every name on the list was a highly respected one: decorated, heroic, responsible for saving hundreds or thousands of lives. More, in Carter’s case.

                “I would never believe that any of them would do this,” he said. “They’ve all shown unbelievable dedication to the program.”

                “Well, I’ve already got Carter in a confinement room, and sent some people to Dixon’s house,” Cam said. “Telford and Reynolds are offworld.”

                “You locked up Carter,” Young said. Cam gave him a hard look.

                “I’m being careful, so yes, I locked up Carter. We’re starting interrogations in the morning. Carter and Telford have both personally talked with Dr. Rush, and knew where he lived, whereas as far as I can tell Reynolds and Dixon never gave his name a second look.” Young looked over at Rush, who was staring at the four thick folders on the bench in front of him.

                “No way either Carter or David did this,” he said, trying to keep calm. “They are both the most by the book people I have ever met.”

                “Which means that no one ever questions what they do,” Vala put in. Jackson gave a sympathetic sigh and crossed his arms, tilting his head to look at Rush.

                “What did you talk about with Carter and Telford?” Rush waved a hand vaguely.

                “Math. I did the consulting for General Carter, and I only met Telford once. He was friendly, I suppose. Everett was there, he can tell you.” Cam snapped his cold gaze over to Young.

                “Everett?”

                “Telford was there to recruit someone else. Rush happened to be there.” He swallowed, rubbed a hand over his eyes. “He was paying a lot of attention to Rush, but if he knew that Rush had been consulting for Carter, maybe he was interested in him too.”

                “Telford doesn’t exactly recruit very many people,” Jackson said neutrally.

                “He’s not a traitor, either,” Young bit back. Rush was flicking his eyes between him and Cam, looking worried.

                “He spent months with the Alliance,” Cam said relentlessly. “Got Morris killed, a whole lot of other gate team members. He’s why you need those crutches.”

                “Yeah, a lot of people were hurt, but he was doing the best he could. He’s the one who got the intel on their base so we could destroy it.” He couldn’t imagine it: not David, who had come to see him in the infirmary, gave him the honest truth about who had died and who had lived. “And he felt guilty over that, as much as I did.” They had talked about it, passing the single smuggled beer back and forth as Young told David about the divorce proceedings, and David tried to sympathize in his mostly unhelpful way.

                “We have our suspects and our questions,” Teal’c cut in. “Colonel Reynolds and Colonel Telford are due back in the next ten hours. We should wait until then.” Young felt a huge wave of gratitude for Teal’c’s quietly realistic suggestion. Cam agreed immediately, and then turned back to him.

                “Look, Everett, these are our suspects. You think I want to believe that Sam did this?”

                “As certain as you are that Carter is innocent, that’s how certain I am about Telford,” he said. “I’m going to bed. Wake me up when you start the interrogations.”

                Rush followed him out of the room.

                “Can you give orders like that even though you’re not in the military anymore?” he said neutrally.

                “We’ll see. If my best friend wants to accuse my other best friend of treason and pull up something I was there for, he’d better wake me up.” Rush walked next to him in silence until they came to the elevator.

                “Why am I still here?” he asked.

                “Probably because Carter’s in a cell.” He stuck his temporary keycard into the elevator slot and pressed up. Rush followed him into the elevator. “And no one knows if the Alliance is interested in recruiting you.” He thought of what Vala had said about Ginn being recruited ‘forcibly.’ “They’re not gonna do it with a beer and a contract, either.”

                “Right,” Rush said, looking upset. Young opened the door to their room again, and Rush preceded him in and held it open while he struggled through on his crutches.

                “You’re as safe as possible here,” he added, and Rush gave him a twisted little smile, as if Young’s pronouncement was funny.

                “I guess the lack of armed guards in our building was the reason I wasn’t safe before,” he said. Young didn’t know what to say, and didn’t want to continue their dinner conversation about Rush joining the SGC.

                “Do you need a new pair of glasses?” he asked instead, as Rush took his shoes off and put his jacket over a chair. Young put forth a lot of effort and didn’t look at his arms, trying to ignore the longing low in his chest and under the palms of his hands. He maybe should have asked for two rooms for them.

                “Not really, I can get by.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t get them till I was sixteen and certainly could have used them beforehand.”

                “I think that’s actually confirmation that you do need a new pair of glasses,” Young said, pulling his shoes and jacket off. He hesitated for a second, then reminded himself that he had been undressing in locker rooms for over twenty years and he wasn’t going to sleep in fatigues if he didn’t have to. He was wearing boxers that left him pretty decent, anyway, so he took off the trousers and left them folded on a chair with his jacket.

                He had to look over at Rush, but he was staring at his hands, and didn’t seem perturbed by Young’s lack of clothing. He climbed into the bed, pulled the covers over himself, and closed his eyes.

                “Turn the lights off whenever you want,” he said, hoping he would fall asleep quickly, despite his nap earlier in the day. He heard Rush walk over to the light switch and the light became much less strong against his closed eyes. There was a rustling that must be Rush getting into bed, and the click of the lamp turning off.

                “Why did you leave the SGC?” Rush asked again, voice quiet but perfectly distinct in the darkness. Young took a deep breath, stared up at the blackness where the ceiling was. He had never told anyone about this, never given even David specifics.

                “I had an affair with someone under my command,” he said. “Someone from HR suggested I leave the base after my discharge, unless I wanted a dishonorable one.”

                “Oh,” Rush said, and didn’t say anything else. Young wasn’t sure whether he felt better or worse after having confessed, and put his hand over his eyes, as if that would banish the thought of TJ or of Emily, neither of whom he had deserved in the end.

                He woke up after uneasy sleep, jaw aching as if he had been clenching his teeth in his sleep, and checked his watch. 0500. Great. He could already tell he wasn’t going to be able to fall back to sleep. He left to use the bathroom and shower again, but ended up lying back on the bed in the room, wondering if Telford and Reynolds had returned, whether Carter and Dixon were currently sleeping in guarded rooms with cameras or lying awake.

                He went to the commissary at seven, not waking Rush, and went to wait outside Jackson’s office. It seemed to be SG-1’s de facto gathering place now that Carter’s lab was half turned over to other people. As expected, the four of them arrived more or less at eight.

                “Telford and Reynolds are both in custody,” Cam said. Young folded his arms, leaning against the wall.

                “I want to be there for the questioning.”

                “Teal’c and the NID are doing the questioning. You can watch with the rest of us, through a one-way mirror,” Cam said, jaw set. Young didn’t push further. Jackson folded his arms.

                “Well,” he said. “I have to go get ready for my lineup.”

                “My idea,” Vala chirped. “Though, ultimately credit goes to Earth’s police procedural shows, I guess.”

                “Maybe Earth’s actual police?” Young suggested, and she tipped her head forward, smiling at him toothily.

                “Smart man,” she said, eyes sliding over him, then flicking over to Jackson. Young kept his face blank, wondering how Cam and Teal’c stood them. Though, in the field they couldn’t bait each other like this, no doubt. Jackson shifted his already folded arms, then walked off.

                “I’m going to get Ginn,” Cam said. Teal’c left as well, leaving Young to walk with Vala to the observation room where they would start the interrogation. She stuck her hands in her pockets, tilting her head back and forth.

                “So,” she said. “What’s the story with your friend Dr. Rush?”

                “He’s a math professor,” Young said, going as fast as he could with the pain down his back and through his hip.

                “An attractive one,” Vala said leadingly. Young huffed out a breath.

                “If you think so,” he said neutrally.

                “You think so,” she said. “Come on, it’s very boring teasing Daniel sometimes. It’s very entertaining to watch you pining.”

                “I’m not pining, and it’s not your business,” he said, and she shrugged.

                “I’m sure it’s not, just something I thought I noticed. Something to take your mind off all of this.”

                Young hit the down button on the elevator.

                “Doesn’t seem to work that way,” he said, because the dread of seeing his friends questioned for treason and conspiracy was sitting like a rock in his stomach. And the thought of Rush was mostly a half-panicked smear of worry that the man would stop talking to him after what he’d confessed. There was absolutely nowhere he could send his thoughts that wasn’t currently terrible.

                “Let’s get on with it then,” Vala said, a bitter edge in her usually cheery voice, and he followed her into the elevator.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A new chapter, hope you guys like it!

                Ginn was waiting in handcuffs outside the room Vala stopped at, her face a mess of green and yellow bruises, but less swollen than it could have been. Cam was saying something to her: perhaps explaining the way a lineup worked. She looked nervous at the sight of Vala, who gave her a weak smile and a threatening raised eyebrow at once.

                He, Cam, and Vala sat down in the chairs of the observation room as Carter, Reynolds, Dixon, and David filed in on the other side of the glass, interspersed with a collection of ground crew, science personnel, and Jackson.

                Ginn clasped her hands in front of her and stared at the lineup.

                “Do you recognize any of these people?” Cam asked quietly. “Take your time.”

                “That’s Samantha Carter,” she said softly. “I recognize her from descriptions, but I never saw her myself.” She tilted her head. “And Inkief, but I guess that’s not his real name.” She pointed to David.

                “David’s cover identity,” Young said.

                “Did you ever see any of these people bringing information to Kiva in the last few months?”

                “No, I don’t think so,” Ginn said, eyes wide. “He maybe looks a little familiar?” She indicated Jackson, but the man had spent so much time on every world in the galaxy, that wasn’t much use. Young saw Cam’s posture slump just slightly.

                “Thank you, Ginn,” he said, and he led her back to the door, handing her over to a waiting corporal outside.

                “That was not helpful,” he said when he came back in. “So much for a clue in narrowing it down.”

                They started with Reynolds, and Young drank coffee with SG-1 while Teal’c and the NID agents cross-examined him, going over the same missions again and again, to the point that he started feeling sorry for the man, who looked exhausted. He didn’t change his story, though, just repeated what had happened in each missions, and denied ever having heard of Rush. It was almost noon before they switched to Dixon, whose interrogation went much the same.

                Young left at one, to get food and to find Rush. He didn’t know when they would be sent away from base: while the investigation into the leak was open, he doubted anyone would ask them to leave. Rush wasn’t in their room, and Young found him in one of the labs a few floors up, talking to Lisa and a man he didn’t recognize.

                “Hey, Colonel,” Lisa said, spotting him lurking a few feet from the open door. “This is Dr. Volker. We’ve been talking to Dr. Rush about his ideas about modeling the gate networks.” Dr. Volker looked skeptical about Rush’s ideas, but Lisa seemed enthused. “Of course, it would be better if Dr. Carter could come, but we’re doing the best explanation we can.”

                “Everett,” Rush said, voice even and with a comforting lack of accusation or malice in his dark eyes. “How are you?”

                “Been better,” he said truthfully. “How are you?”

                “Good,” he said, turning back to the pieces of paper that Lisa and Dr. Volker had laid out in front of him. “The stargates are—amazing.” He was holding a pencil in his right hand, and was writing out long lines of letters and numbers onto blank sheets of paper. Dr. Volker was looking over his shoulder, and Lisa was dropping hints about various accidents pertaining to the gate network, letting Rush pick them up and most likely extrapolate.

                “He doesn’t have any clearance,” Young said, and she nodded at him, pretending to seal her lips. Scientists. They could never shut up about anything. “Do you want to get some food?” he asked Rush instead.

                “I had breakfast.”

                “It’s after one,” Young replied, and Rush just shrugged and walked to the door, as if what time he ate was completely immaterial.

                There was baked chicken, baked potatoes, and some sort of baked vegetable casserole in the commissary, all pretty dry. Young wondered when his crockpot stews had become good enough that he wished he had one of them instead of the bone-dry meat he was currently chewing. Rush, as usual, didn’t seem to notice his food as he ate it.

                “So,” Young said. “Are you gonna address what I said, or what?” Rush looked up, a little surprised. Young figured that after his morning, his tone might be a bit more aggressive than Rush was used to, but talking about this was his least favorite activity.

                “It’s not really my business,” Rush said carefully, left hand rubbing at the side of his tray.

                “That I’m an unfaithful person doesn’t matter to you?” Rush’s slight fiddling with his tray turned into full-on tapping against the table.

                “Did you apologize and confess?”

                “Yes, but that’s not really grounds for still being my friend to most people.”

                “Well, I’m not most people then,” Rush said curtly. Young still felt unsettled, and went back to chewing on his chicken, trying to think. “If you want to punish yourself, you don’t need me to tell you that being unfaithful is a terrible breach of trust. But you have never seemed an untrustworthy person to me.” Young didn’t say anything, finding it difficult to meet Rush’s eyes for longer than a fleeting moment.

                “This chicken is terrible,” he said eventually. Rush raised his eyebrows.

                “I’ve had worse.”

                They ate the rest of the time mostly in quiet, except for Rush occasionally asking him a question about the stargate that Young couldn’t answer.

                “How can you go through it every day and not understand how it dials? Does that not bother you?”

                “Nope,” Young said. “Moot point now anyway.” It was nearly two, and though he didn’t want to watch another few hours of Dixon being raked over the coals, he’d asked to be at the interrogations. He cleared his tray away and pointed Rush back towards Lisa’s lab. That got him a narrow-eyed glare and a comment that he could navigate a missile silo, thank you.

                Cam was sitting in the same seat he’d been in before, looking grim. Vala was gone: to talk to Kiva, according to Jackson, who didn’t seem to have much hope about that bearing any fruit. Jackson was watching and taking notes and seemed lost in thought half the time. Young wondered if Ginn, the Alliance programmer, could have collected Carter’s notes remotely. It seemed unlikely, but then so did any of the SGC leaders betraying them.

                His back was cramping horribly by the time they let Dixon back to his cell, and Teal’c and the NID agents left as well. They must need a break too, after nearly eight hours of questioning. Vala returned, but didn’t say anything.

                David was next: he was unshaven, and still in his offworld clothes (as had been Reynolds), sans all his gear. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His eyes moved from the obvious two-way mirror to the cameras to the black-suited agents to Teal’c.

                “All right,” he said, sitting down and folding his arms, expression more annoyed than anything. “Am I getting an explanation?”

                “Have you passed confidential SGC information to the Lucian Alliance or the Trust?”

                “ _No,_ ” he snapped.

                “Go over the details of your mission to P5X-844 this past October fourteenth.”

                “I wrote a mission report.”

                “Colonel Telford,” Teal’c cut in. “It is best if you cooperate rather than exercise your wit.”

                By the time they had gone through all of SG-8’s missions to Alliance planets, several times each, Young felt as exhausted as David looked.

                “Explain why you left your team to investigate this local merchant on your own.”

                “I didn’t want to spook him, and the gate needed to be kept under our control. We had no backup from ships, and our only exit from a hostile planet was the gate.”

                “You went alone into the settlement to pass information to Lucian Alliance officers.”

                “No.”

                “You have shown disregard for the lives and safety of SGC personnel when you failed to warn about the attack on the beta site, critically injuring or killing members of SG-4, SG-10, SG-12, and multiple base personnel.”

                “Don’t bring that into this,” David snarled, stiffening in his chair.

                “You wouldn’t be the first man to flip while in deep cover,” one of the agents said.

                “Stop,” he snapped.

                “With your connections at the SGC, you could bring in enough information to be a powerful man in the Alliance when you finally severed your ties here,” Teal’c said.

                “It’s not about the power!” David shouted, and Young felt a chill run through his whole body as David froze, then turned his gaze to the mirror, eyes wild. “Was I the only person who learned a damn thing from the war with the Ori? The Tau’ri: we as a people, as an organization, are too self-centered, too thinly spread, too hardheaded and greedy to accomplish anything. The same goes for the Jaffa and the Tok’ra, and I’m not going to add myself to the list of _dying societies_ when the next big threat arrives.”

                Young felt himself break out into a sweat, unable to tear his eyes away from David’s furious, unafraid face as the NID agents and Teal’c chained and shackled him, then dragged him out of the room.

                “Jesus,” Cam breathed out next to him. Young buried his face in his hands. Behind them, Daniel and Vala’s pacing had stopped.

                Young left the room, unable to ignore every spark of pain going down his spine and leg, feeling every wrench in his knee and the suddenly hateful texture of the handles of his crutches, and knowing David could have warned them. Morris could be alive. He could be standing upright. The gains the Alliance had made might never have been.

                He couldn’t believe David would betray them for the Alliance. The Alliance, with their brutality and torture and drug dealing and enslavement, full of terrorists like Kiva and terrified teenagers like Ginn. David was good at pretending to be a man who was fine with those things, and certainly he was bad at being friendly or even civil sometimes, but that was how some people responded to the stress. But he had never been amoral.

                “Everett,” Cam called, and a few loping steps later, he had caught up to Young.

                “I’m not having a conversation about it,” he said.

                “You should,” Cam replied.

                “I’m not right now,” he said. He took the elevator back to the floor Lisa’s lab was on, but no one was inside. He wanted to sit down next to Rush, and talk about set theory or combinatorics or some other kind of difficult mathematical concept that would drag his mind away from the thought that his best friend was a traitor.

                He found Rush in their room, reading a stapled packet of papers. He looked up as Young walked in.

                “Shit, you look like someone tried to kill you.”

                “David confessed,” he said, and to his dismay, his voice cracked. His nose and eyes felt hot and there was a pain building in the back of his head. Rush set his papers down, face at a loss. Young walked over and sat down next to him on his bed, putting his face in his hands.

                “I’m so sorry,” Rush said, and touched his shoulder for a moment, then rested his hand lightly on his arm. Young shuddered, wanting nothing more than to give in to the comfort but unwilling to give into the pain and rage that were rising up and would break out of the cage he was holding them in if he acknowledged he needed comfort.

                “I just can’t believe he would do this to us,” he said. “David is a good man. Not a nice one, but a good man.” He took a slow breath through his nose, forcing back sobs but unable to help the tears that were slipping out and running against his hands. Rush didn’t ask him to stop talking into his palms, just let him sit hunched forward, and squeezed his arm slightly.

                “If you really think he can’t have done this, is there a reason he would confess anyway?”

                Young thought of the hateful conviction in his eyes, the perfect sound of the way he’d lied through every question until he’d lost it. But David never lost it, not in that kind of situation. Not safe in an interrogation room. If he was going to start shouting, it would have been, _should_ have been that he was loyal, that he hated murder and anarchy. He took a deep breath, straightened up, wiped his eyes with the back of his hands.

                “Will you come somewhere with me?” he asked, and Rush nodded.

                They took the elevator to the level with the permanent quarters, Young thinking back to the height of the war with the goa’uld and how the worry of having hosts come into the base had led to blood tests and neck exams being routine for returning teams.

                They waited outside Teal’c’s quarters for about a half an hour before Teal’c himself arrived. Rush hadn’t said much, just stood with his arms folded and glared at everyone who walked by.

                “Colonel Young,” he said. “I did not greet you personally, but I am glad to see you again.” Young shook his hand. “Dr. Rush, it is a pleasure to meet you.” Rush took his hand awkwardly, nodding.

                “Can we talk?” Young asked.

                “Of course.” Teal’c’s rooms were fairly big, since he lived on the base, and were decorated with a mixture of Earth and Jaffa art. He seemed to have a fondness for masks, which Young found vaguely disturbing, if appropriate for the conversation he was about to have.

                “Are they going to run tests tomorrow with all that za’tarc detector equipment we used to use?” Teal’c lit one of the multiple candles on his desk, and there was a subtle smell of sage and violet that filled the room. Rush stood by the door, watching everything with a guarded expression.

                “That equipment is meant for use with people who don’t know they are traitors.”

                “But that’s not the only kind of brainwashing there is,” Young said. Teal’c gave him an even look.

                “No, it is not, but there is no way that I know to detect that such manipulation has been done. It is necessary to rely on knowledge of the person’s true nature.”

                “How, exactly, do you break that kind?” He was pretty sure he knew, and focused on the smell of candle wax and perfume in the air.

                “The afflicted person has to die,” Teal’c said. “The doctors here would never condone the rite.”

                “But you would,” Young said. Teal’c inclined his head.

                “I would rather die than serve a false god, and Bra’tac knew that when he guided me through it.” Young nodded.

                “David would rather die than betray us.”

                “Are you absolutely certain this is the choice that David Telford would make, were he in his right mind?” Teal’c asked. Young considered for a moment, weighing the terrible possibilities that David would wake up a traitor still, or that he would never wake up at all.

                “Yes.”

                “Let us go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the ideas for the interrogation scene are similar to another SG-1/SGU crossover, "Mathématique" by cleanwhiteroom, though the context is very different.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a description of someone being asphyxiated then resuscitated, along the lines of what happened in "Subversion." If you don't want to read it, skip from the line "Young swallowed" and start reading again at "A doctor is needed on level six." I don't think it's graphic, but it could be upsetting.

                Young looked over at Rush, who was still standing in the doorway, arms crossed.

                “Will you help?” he asked.

                “What are we doing?” he replied. Teal’c pulled on his jacket over the black t-shirt he was currently wearing.

                “There are at least two ways of brainwashing developed by the goa’uld and employed by the Alliance,” he said. “One where the subject is not consciously aware of their changed loyalties, and usually is used as an assassin, committing suicide after they have accomplished their task. The other is truly converted to the other side, and in the case of someone like Colonel Telford, can be a very useful double agent in the long term, especially if they are smart.”

                “You think that is what happened to David?” Rush asked, and Young nodded.

                “Recovery requires remembering things suppressed during the brainwashing process, and the process itself,” Teal’c continued. “It is extremely dangerous.”

                “Hasn’t been done at the SGC in something like ten years,” Young said. “But luckily it doesn’t require much knowledge to perform the ceremony.” He could use a defibrillator, and set up an oxygen line.

                “I am not a doctor,” Rush said. “And I doubt I can be helpful.” Young considered.

                “We need a distraction to get what we need from the infirmary.” Epinephrine and a defibrillator were absolutely necessary, and restraints would only help.

                “We should also ask Vala Mal Doran to join us,” Teal’c said. “She will be naturally sympathetic, and we may need her skills.”

                “Rush, come with me, and we’ll get Vala.”

                Vala listened to their plan with a furious expression in her silvery eyes, and picked up her keycard from the table next to her bed with careful long fingers, and then took a medium sized purse from under her bed, then a briefcase made of some synthetic material, which she handed to Rush.

                “Okay,” she said, and pulled on a civilian jacket. “You are in charge of talking to Carolyn. Rush and I will get everything we need.”

                “What exactly happens in this ceremony?” Rush asked, when they were in the elevator. He hefted the briefcase, which was flat and empty.

                “The Rite of M’al Sharran,” Vala said, accent perfect, “is a way of finding one’s real truth.”

                “You have to stop the heart,” Young said. Rush gave him a long look.

                “You’re going to do that to your best friend?”

                “The alternative is keeping him something other than who he is,” Young said, and Rush gave him a faint smile.

                “I approve,” he said, as the elevator stopped.

                Dr. Lam was on duty, but unfortunately had no returning gate teams to be checking over, so Young limped his way over to her.

                “Colonel,” she said. “This feels like a setback.” He grimaced, sitting down. In the corner of his eye, he could see the second door open quietly, and Vala and Rush slip through.

                “There was a bit of an emergency,” he said. “Brightman said it was all muscle strain, no new damage.”

                “It’s funny, your muscles are connected to your joints and bones, where there is a lot of damage.” She gave him an unimpressed once-over. “Have you been walking around a lot?”

                “I honestly haven’t been,” he said. “I didn’t come to ask you anything, just to say thanks. Until—“ he paused, trying to think of exactly how many days it had been— “until two days ago, it was going a lot better.” Behind Lam, he saw Rush walk out of the infirmary, head bent over some papers and looking preoccupied. Vala was still inside, then.

                “Keep doing your physical therapy,” she said. “It wasn’t a fun surgery, and it’s really too bad there wasn’t time to get you to a real orthopedic surgeon.” Where the hell was Vala?

                “Have you heard from Lieutenant Johansen?” he asked, and she raised one eyebrow at him.

                “Just once, to email her a textbook. She seems to be doing well.” Vala passed through the edge of her vision.

                “Good,” he said roughly. “I better go.”

                Vala and Rush had gone ahead of him, which was no doubt for the best. He took the elevator back down, coming out on the level of lockup. As soon as he stepped out of the elevator, Teal’c fell into step beside him, walking out of the men’s bathroom.

                There were two airmen outside David’s door, who snapped to attention when they saw Teal’c.

                “You are dismissed,” he said.

                “May as well get something to eat,” Young added, and they nodded, hurrying off towards the elevators. A few moments later, Vala and Rush raced up, and Teal’c swept his card through the door lock.

                David was shackled to the bench of a bed, face grey. He sat upright, eyes flicking over from Teal’c to Young to Vala to Rush.

                “Everett,” he said, offering Young a harsh smile. “What the hell are you doing here?”

                “I’m here to save you.” He took the briefcase from Rush, opened it to reveal a battery powered defibrillator and proper medical restraints. There was a pillow without a case and no sheets on the thin mattress on the bench, but there was some space for hooking up more chains, for these kinds of restraints. He looked over at Rush.

                “Just stay out of his reach, okay?” Rush moved so that his back was against the door, watching David.

                “Sure,” he said, and Vala set her purse down carefully, next to Rush’s feet, and exchanged a look with Teal’c. They moved together, Vala grabbing the chain at David’s ankles and getting it around his legs as Teal’c got his arms around Telford’s, holding them together in front of him. Young moved forward as best as he could, getting one of his wrists secured to the wall, and then, with no side rail on the bed, settling for locking the other restraint to the one locked to the wall. David struggled, spitting and slamming his head back into Teal’c’s neck.

                “What are you doing?” he shouted, jerking his whole body and making Vala stagger, then brace her back against the wall. Teal’c moved to secure his feet, then leaned down hard on his abdomen, keeping him relatively still. Vala brought the purse back, setting four safety syringes full of epinephrine on the floor just under the bench, then pulling out a heavy, dark gold device set with a huge carved red stone. She slid it over her hand and let out a long sigh.

                “What the fuck are you doing?” David said, as Young took the defibrillator from the briefcase and set it down next to the syringes. He glanced over at Teal’c, and shook his head. “This is going to do no good.” Young yanked the pillow out from where it was trapped behind his shoulders.

                “Shut up, David,” he said, grabbing the pillow and trying to control the shaking in his hands.

                “There is only one chance, Everett,” Teal’c said. “It’s not a lingering death like it was for me.”

                “Well good, because we don’t have much time before someone opens that door,” Vala said, shifting on her feet. “You’re not really supposed to check this out without an approved reason.”

                Young swallowed, focused all the pain in his back and leg, all the rage at David’s words during his interrogation, down into his hands. Then he pushed the pillow over his face, pressed down carefully, and gritted his teeth.

                Even with Teal’c pushing on his shoulders and abdomen, David was still strong as hell, and Young grimaced, leaning onto the bed, lifting his leg to trap his head between his knee and the wall. He was thrashing against the restraints, a muffled scream against Young’s hands, twisting his whole body against Teal’c, against Young.

                “Jesus Christ,” Rush said from the doorway, and moved towards them. Young half expected him to try and pull him back, but he just fidgeted behind them, pacing anxiously.

                It took an obscenely long time for him to slow, then stop struggling, much longer than Young remembered for other fights that had ended in choking. He kept the pillow pressed down, felt for the sluggish, arrhythmic pulse in his neck.

                “Can we do it now?” Rush said, voice high, panting.

                “Shh,” Young said, feeling David’s pulse stop under his fingers. A minute should do it. He looked down at his watch, started a count. “Sixty seconds?” He tossed the pillow to the side, looking down at David’s contorted, still face, eyes staring up blankly. He had a sudden need to vomit, but pushed it back. Get through this.

                “And an extra twenty,” Teal’c said.

                “That’s fifty,” Young said, unlocking his wrists from one another and pulling him so his chest was open, tipping his head back. He picked up and turned on the paddles, and Teal’c picked up the syringe, turning David’s arm so the veins in his elbow were exposed and pulling off the safety cap. “Seventy.”

                The buzz of the paddles was joined by the humming of the healing device. Seventy-eight.

                “Clear!” Young ordered, and pressed the paddles down against his chest, discharging. “Teal’c, now.” He stepped back, lifting his hands out of the way and charging again. Teal’c pushed the epinephrine in slowly, and Young felt for a pulse. None. “Clear,” he said, pushed the paddles down again. Discharge. A minute and a half with no heartbeat was hardly anything. Come on.

                David’s chest expanded with a rasping sigh, his eyes fluttering closed. Teal’c picked up his radio.

                “A doctor is needed on level six,” he said. “Immediately. Telford’s room.” Young stepped back, switched off the paddles, as David took another painful-sounding breath. Vala lowered her arm, the glow fading from the device.

                “Well, we didn’t need this,” she said. “I don’t feel any extensive damage in his brain, lungs, or heart, besides the stress.”

                “Everett,” David rasped. “Oh god, I’m sorry.”

                “Shh,” Young said. “Dr. Lam is on her way, just breathe.”

                “Thank you,” he said. “God, thank you.” Young stepped back, feeling unsteady on his feet. Rush, who looked white around the mouth and sweaty, but whose hands weren’t shaking at all, put his hand under Young’s arm and helped him until he was leaning against the wall.

                Teal’c was undoing the mess of chains wrapped around David’s ankles, and Vala was smiling down at David.

                “Welcome back,” she said. “Smile.”

                “Vala, I am not sure that is necessary,” Teal’c interjected, but Rush spoke over him.

                “No, good idea. He could have a stroke.”

                “I’m not having a fucking stroke,” David snarled, and Young saw him give Vala a horrible grimace.

                “Both sides of your face work,” she said brightly. “I would tell you to raise both arms over your head, but you really can’t do that.”

                There was a click from the other side of the door, and it opened to reveal Dr. Lam, two nurses, and two guards.

                “What the hell is going on here?” she snapped, voice icy.

                “He’s okay,” Young said. She gave him a hard look, eyes moving from the defibrillator in his hands to Vala holding the healing device.

                “You,” she said to Teal’c. “Explain.”

                “We have performed the rite of M’al Sharran on David Telford,” Teal’c said, voice calm.

                “Which entails what exactly?” Lam asked, putting her fingers against David’s throat and shining a light into his eyes at the same time.

                “Stopping the heart and then resuscitating the afflicted person.” She didn’t say anything in response to that, just unhooked her stethoscope from around her neck and sliding the end under his shirt.

                “I’m fine,” David said, voice still ragged.

                “Breathe in as deep as you can,” Lam said tersely. He did, chest expanding, then started coughing, almost choking, and Lam rolled him onto his side. Young winced at the sound, and one of the nurses snatched the defibrillator from his hands, giving him a disapproving look. “Someone take the chains off his legs, and get a stretcher down here.”

                “Ma’am, I don’t think we can move him without restraints,” one of the guards said.

                “He’s just died, I think you two will suffice as an escape deterrent,” she retorted.

                “I’m fine,” David gasped.

                “You, don’t talk,” she said. “Just breathe. Did you use the healing device?”

                “No,” Vala said quickly.

                “We administered epinephrine and used the defibrillator twice,” Teal’c said gravely. Lam looked over her shoulder at the door.

                “Where is my damn stretcher?” she snapped into her radio.

                “Coming, ma’am,” one of the nurses said. She looked over at Young and Rush.

                “You two and Vala, get out, it’s crowded already. Teal’c is more than enough security.” Young really did not want to go, but Rush tugged him out the door.

                “Just wait in the infirmary,” Rush said, while Vala cleared a path through a bundle of people who were starting to congregate around the door.

                “Dr. Lam wants people out of the way,” she said sternly. That got them to move, and Young ducked into the men’s bathroom to throw up into the sink, his hands shaking uncontrollably on the counter. Rush handed him a dampened paper towel wordlessly.

                The elevator ride to the infirmary was via the one further from the room, so the medical team could go up the other, and they got to the infirmary after them, while Lam and the nurses were doing things like hooking him up to a heart monitor and a saline drip. The steady beep of the machine was comforting, even if the oxygen line under David’s nose wasn’t. Lam turned on them as soon as she was done with the machines.

                “Come here,” she ordered. Young approached, looking over at David’s bed. He looked pale. “He nearly coded in the elevator,” Lam said. “His lungs sound like shit. I assume you smothered him?”

                “Yeah,” Young said. She pressed her lips together. “He’s himself again, though.”

                “If he ever wasn’t,” she said flatly. “You could be charged for reckless endangerment, if not manslaughter or murder.”

                “There was precedent,” he said, and she gave him a hard look.

                “You are lucky there was.”

                She let Young sit down next to David’s bed, warning him not to touch him, and moved away, possibly to chew out Teal’c or Vala.

                “Vala said your lungs were fine,” he said. “I’m sorry.” David turned his head, giving him a tired smile.

                “Well, the healing device can lead to trauma too, it might be a balance thing,” he said. “Everett, thank you.” He drew in a harried breath. He sounded too much like he was in the middle of cooling down after a run for Everett’s taste. “Don’t listen to Lam, it was worth it.” He flicked his gaze over to Rush. “Dr. Rush,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

                “You should know,” Rush said, but David just frowned.

                “You passed his name onto the Alliance,” Young said gently. “Do you remember?” The beeping of the monitor increased in pace slightly, and David shifted, propping himself up on his elbows with some effort.

                “I remember everything,” he said, sounding strained. “God, I remember, but I never said anything about Rush.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are only so many ways you can mercifully kill someone, and as in last chapter, there are going to be similarities between this and the M'al Sharran scene in Mathématique as well as the canon events of breaking Telford's mind control in "Subversion" and Teal'c's in "Threshold."


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it's been a long time. Sorry about that. This chapter has a lot of infodumping, because I didn't set up the plot well enough earlier, but that's the way of it. I hope you like it anyway.

                Young stayed next to David’s bed, trying to work through possibilities. Rush, standing next to his chair, was anxious, hands clenching and stilling. He seemed to be trying to stay calm.

                “You’re certain?” he asked David, dropping his voice. David nodded.

                “What would they want with Rush? What happened?”

                “The Trust,” Young said. “They had two Alliance operatives prisoner, and targeted Rush. They wanted to repair Merlin’s weapon, to free Anubis. We thought that Rush’s information came from the Alliance.”

                “I didn’t ever talk to any of my contacts about Dr. Rush.” He gave Rush an interested look. “You don’t look very good.” Rush raised his eyebrows disbelievingly.

                “Shit, then it was two separate leaks.” The Trust and the Alliance.

                “The Alliance may run into the Trust: they have connections off Earth as well, but they don’t get along. For obvious reasons.” David’s heart rate was picking up, and a nurse was sending Young dirty looks for agitating him.

                “We’ll work it out.” Now it seemed David was the only person he could trust with Rush, but he was confined to bed and was probably due to be debriefed for several days as soon as Dr. Lam conceded his care. Possibly sooner, depending on how hard her arm was twisted. He stood up slowly, grabbing the crutches. David looked away. Rush followed him from the infirmary to their temporary quarters, eyes flicking in every direction.

                “You look jumpy, stop that,” Young grumbled, as they neared the elevator.

                “I don’t feel safe.” Well, you’re not safe, Young would say, but that wasn’t helpful. Rush’s shoulders relaxed as soon as they were behind the locked door of their quarters. He paced back and forth in front of the beds.

                “So we stopped the Lucian Alliance leak, but it’s the Trust that wants you, and their information didn’t come from the Alliance,” Young said, in case Rush wasn’t quite following the politics.

                “Thanks,” Rush snapped. He was, then. “It must be Dr. Carter, then.”

                “Her interrogation’s been conducted, and she passed. Brain’s her own and everything.”

                “Who else is there, then?” Young pressed a hand to his eyes.

                “The net is much wider: people who have access to Carter’s files on you. No other requirements. The Trust are on Earth. They can, as we know, come right to your door.”

                “Yes, well, did the information about the other scientist, the Alliance woman, come to the Trust the same way? Maybe there is still a link after all. The informant might have had knowledge of them, even if they weren’t in direct contact.”

                “Someone who keeps tabs on Alliance personnel? Lots of people have access to that information, since David and other people have returned from cover. It’s important to know.”

                Rush gave him an unsatisfied look, as if his pointing out the reality of the situation was interfering with his theorizing. He scratched at the side of his jaw, looking slightly surprised at the lengthening stubble under his fingers.

                “Who can we trust, then?” he asked. “I don’t think Telford is going to be much use in the hospital.”

                “Carter,” Young said. “Since she’s just been cleared.” Damn, he had not missed the paranoia about brainwashing that had filled the SGC in the early 2000s.

                “What about the brainwashing?” Rush said, sounding like he was getting good and settled into paranoia. Young was considering his response when his stomach growled fiercely. He checked his watch, and was unsurprised to see that it was almost four a.m. Being in the mountain slowly erased everyone’s internal clock, especially when you added in gate travel or incredibly high stress.

                “I need food,” he said. It would be nice if he could get the taste of vomit out of his mouth as well. “Let’s go to the commissary, then I’ll ask Carter if I can speak to the Alliance prisoners, see if they know how they were taken prisoner.” He needed to sleep as well, but that seemed unlikely to happen soon, based on Rush’s jitters.

                Carter was in the commissary as well, sleepily picking at a plate piled with the usual off-hours offerings: bread, casseroles, odd desserts. Her plate had two dishes of blue Jell-o, two hard-boiled eggs, and some slices of sweet bread. Young settled for a great deal of the leftovers casserole and sat down across from her.

                “I hear you brought Telford back to us,” she said, and nodded to Rush as he sat down. “That was brave.”

                Young ate some of his food, trying to think of the best way to approach this. In the end, Carter was a lot like him: she preferred straightforward information, no political dancing around subjects.

                “They haven’t debriefed him yet,” he said. “But David seems to think that the Alliance wasn’t involved in getting Rush’s information to the Trust. What do you think, Sam?”

                She looks surprised for a second, then gets it.

                “Well, obviously an official investigation will be started after his debriefing,” she said, face pinched. “But for now, everyone assumes the leak is stopped.” Her hushed voice still had its typical bright tone, as if their conversation was nothing more than relieved chatter. Rush’s posture was still filled with tension, but no one at the SGC knew him well enough that they could tell, Young thought. He had hardly eaten anything; hopefully he wouldn’t pass out from hunger during whatever the hell they were going to have to do.

                “Maybe we should have another discussion with the Alliance members who were captured with us, General,” Rush said. “After all, the other programmer and I should really have a discussion about our respective specialties, see if we were the Trust’s targets for any specific reason. It may help us elucidate any long term plans they might have.” Young frowned, but whatever he meant, couched in such vague terms, clicked with Carter.

                “You and Daniel would get on like a house on fire,” she said, smiling slightly. “I’ll just make that part of the official process dealing with your kidnapping. Therefore, Young will come too.”

                Young had time to finish his food and coffee, and then Carter was leading them to a lower level. Once they were in the elevator, Rush shrugged at him.

                “Obfuscation is less stressful than sneaking around,” he said. “I’ve just had enough of that for a while I think.” Saying one thing and doing another wasn’t Young’s style, and he wished that he didn’t have to treat the SGC like enemy territory, trusting a scant handful of people. Carter had experience doing so, at least, but where Rush had relaxed into assurance, she looked tense.

                No one questioned her, though, as they stopped outside the room where Ginn was being held. The guard at the door just saluted and stepped aside for them. The girl was asleep inside, despite the lights that didn’t turn off, and she blinked at the three of them with dark, sharp eyes from behind the mask of bruises and cuts.

                “Hi,” Carter said. “Sorry to wake you.” Ginn was sitting up, climbing out from under the blankets of the bed. “We have some more questions.”

                “Okay,” she said without hesitation, and her eyes flicked over to Rush. She nodded at him. Young, from the corner of his eye, saw him dip his head in return. She didn’t acknowledge Young except to give him a nervous look.

                “We need to know anything that Athena said about why she captured you, and how she did it.” Carter sat down on the bed, next to Ginn.

                “The goa’uld,” she started uncomfortably, then paused, twisting her hands. “Everyone knows they steal most of their tech, but most of it was stolen, um, in the distant past. They don’t learn new things well, mostly.” She leaned forward slightly. “Especially not, such, uh, what’s the word, things that are…” she gestured as if she was spreading out a cloud with her hands. “Things that are effective in…” Another gesture, a finger wiggling up and down as it moved across. “Like the device,” she said. Rush stepped forward.

                “Conceptual? Metaphysical? Non-corporeal?” he asked. Ginn bit her lip.

                “Things that are not solid,” Carter said, and said a few things in shaky goa’uld. Ginn nodded vigorously.

                “Yes, yes! Things that are physical, but electromagnetic. Things with Ascension.”

                “So why you specifically?” Carter pressed. Ginn shrugged and shook her head.

                “I don’t know,” she said.

                “How were you captured?”

                “We were coming out of the tel’tak, and we were ambushed.” She bit her lip again and her shoulders drew up. “I’ve never been that close to goa’uld before,” she said, voice shaky. “I told the other woman everything she asked!” she added, voice rising in fear.

                “We know,” Young said. “You were ambushed on Earth: who knew you were going there?”

                “No one, I only knew where we were going when Kiva told Varro where to fly to. It was a secret. I don’t know what she was planning to do here.” Ginn hunched further. “You should ask her who knew.”

                Young ran through the problem in his mind, trying to determine whether there was any good reason to think that the presence of Lucian Alliance captives of the Trust was a result of a leak to the Trust from the SGC. After all, the Trust could have independently infiltrated the Alliance: the goa’uld had found their way into the Tok’ra, the NID, the Jaffa. Rush and Ginn could have been two independent targets, two human programmers who had some faint familiarity with Ancient tech, and who were in vulnerable positions. But the Trust, as far as they knew, were isolated on Earth: they had no space-faring vessels. The intel about the Alliance had to come from the SGC.

                Either way, Ginn was exhausted and apparently not in the know enough to help. She needed an icepack and some ibuprofen, in his estimation. Carter seemed similarly unhopeful about this line of information, and their eyes met resignedly. Plan B would be a lot more unpleasant, and likely just as unproductive.

                “We’ll talk to Kiva, then,” Carter said. She looked over at Rush. “You could keep talking to Ginn, see if there is anything similar you know that might explain their interest in you.” Rush looked slightly alarmed at the idea, and flicked his eyes nervously over to Ginn. “I’ll just call the guard back in,” she said.

                The guard at Kiva’s cell looked surprised to see them, and said that the nurse had just left the room as they opened the door. Kiva herself was lying down, her black leather swapped for a t-shirt and sweatpants, to accommodate the bandaged wound in her side. Her room had a bed with blankets, a toilet and sink, and a sunken light overhead. Someone had left bottles of water and Gatorade for her, and there was an empty plate as well.

                She jerked to a sitting position as soon as the door opened, hand going to her side in a cautious gesture that made Young’s hip twinge with a combination of sympathy and satisfaction.

                “Kiva,” Carter said flatly. Kiva gave her a once-over, narrowing her eyes.

                “Tau’ri,” she said. “What do you want?”

                “Nothing on the Alliance,” Young said. “Just a common enemy.” She stared back at him, head high. “How did the Trust capture you?”

                “That would certainly not give away any Alliance intelligence,” she said scornfully, and added something that didn’t sound complimentary in goa’uld.

                “I thought you weren’t into speaking their language anymore,” Young said, adjusting his grip on his crutches. Kiva’s eyes snapped over to him, furious.

                “Let me just learn a language that isn’t that of my enslavers or my enemies,” she snarled. Young bristled.

                “You made us your enemies,” he said. Carter held up a hand.

                “We can all agree that we hate the goa’uld more than we hate each other,” she said. “Just tell us who knew where you were.” In response, Kiva just sat up straighter and pressed her lips together. He limped forward, past Carter, until he was right in front of her, so close that she couldn’t stand up. She didn’t like that, but just glared back at him.

                “I saved you back in that room,” he said. She curled her lip.

                “You needed me to help you fight. I’m the one who took the knife in the side.”

                Young let out a short, mirthless laugh. “I saved you when I didn’t kill you after the fight,” he said. “Your people killed mine and crippled me.” He lowered his voice. “I’m not under General Carter’s authority anymore, and I will cripple _you_ right now if you don’t cooperate.”

                Her cool eyes met his, and he knew that she wasn’t going to fold. She just lifted her chin even further.

                “You should really get down to the actual torturing if you’re on a tight schedule,” she said evenly. He stepped back, fighting back the real urge to hurt her, feeling his mouth turn up into an angry smile.

                “You don’t care that the Trust have likely brainwashed some of your people the way you brainwashed ours?”

                That surprised her: her eyes widened slightly, and then went flinty.

                “You found out.”

                “That advantage is about to go away for the Alliance,” Young said. “Not that any of you who are free will learn that.”

                “We’ve been slaves for so many generations we don’t even remember our own languages,” Kiva said, her English accent wavering in the face of the goa’uld phonemes she must have grown up speaking. “We’re not going to be slaves to the Tau’ri, or the Jaffa, or the Tok’ra.”

                Young had another thought, and shot a questioning glance at Carter, who nodded at him. She couldn’t know what he was planning, not for sure, but she trusted him. That was encouraging.

                “But that’s not my point. My point is that what the Trust are trying to do is reinstate Anubis. What they had Ginn and Rush doing while you were locked up was working on eradicating the Ancients. Thereby removing the limits of power we all know exist on the Ascended, and letting Anubis take back his throne. With more power than before. A goa’uld with the power of the Ori.” That was a stretch, because he didn’t really know how the Ori did anything, but the threat was real enough. Someone would take Athena’s place.

                Kiva looked at him, then over at Carter, who looked back evenly.

                “The people who knew where we would be operated out of what you would call P9X-778,” she said. “It’s a neutral planet. Their population is down after the Ori, so there are a lot of new settlers and a lot of new trade.” She twisted her mouth again, as though she tasted something vile, or was about to do something against her better judgment. “Our mission was only planned two weeks ahead of time, so the Trust must have been there then.”

                The Trust’s man or woman on the inside. Young still felt sick when he thought about it. Who else? Wasn’t it enough that David had suffered at the hands of the Alliance? Hadn’t they done enough, in ten years, to be left alone by the goa’uld?

                He was distracted out of his bitter thoughts when Kiva moved, face pained. Young could tell she wanted to lie back down: her side must be killing her. Unfortunately, probably not literally. He turned away, not wanting to deal with the messy hate he had for her. They needed to check who’d been to P9X-778.

                Carter got Rush out of Ginn’s room. He looked considerably more composed than he had when they’d left him.

                “She could do well with some instruction in our circuitboard-based computing. Self-taught on crystals: it’s impressive,” he said. This didn’t mean much to Young, but Carter gave a rueful nod of agreement.

                “You’re saying she’s as much of a genius as you?” he asked. Rush turned to give him a curious look as they got in the elevator.

                “I never claimed to be a genius,” he said, but his voice said he was flattered. Young felt a little hot under the collar.

                “That’s not—I just meant, that it’s like your—“ He paused, somewhat aghast at the way he was losing control of his words. He never, ever did that. “You said that a lot of it came naturally to you.”

                “I did,” Rush acknowledged, and there was something pleased, appraising almost, in the way he looked at Young. It made him feel, for a moment, something other than the utter bleakness and rage that talking to Kiva had stirred up. Carter hit the level for her office, and the door closed.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided that having a completely coherent plot was not as much fun as continuing to write this story, so if it doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't make sense to me either.

                P9X-778. Young repeated it over and over, silently, as they walked from the elevator to Carter’s office. It was full of computers, including some that looked like they hadn’t been replaced since 1997. Knowing Carter, though, she had built them all herself and the insides wouldn’t match the yellowed cases with their fading stickers.

                She didn’t sit down, just leaned over one of the desks and typed a few lines into the blank screen.

                “All right,” she said evenly. “SG-1 and SG-7 were there for a routine visit: both teams had visited there during the Ori conquest, and keep up the diplomatic relations with the current government.” She tilted her head. “I must have not been on that mission, I don’t remember that.” She drummed her fingers on her desk. “The mission reports are all basically the same: the settlements aren’t in great shape, somewhat overrun with thieves and so forth, but trade is growing, and the population is rebounding somewhat.”

                “Just as Kiva said,” Young said. “Probably a good place for the Alliance to use for their rendezvous.”

                “So we can’t trust SG-1?” Rush asked sharply. “The very people in charge of this investigation?” His hands clenched into fists, and he folded his arms tightly around his body. Young tried to think.

                “It’s almost certainly not Teal’c or Vala, they stay on base most of the time, no opportunities for the Trust to grab them,” he said slowly. “That leaves Daniel, Cam, and SG-7. If Kiva told us the truth.”

                “What we need is the Lucian Alliance member who ratted out Kiva to an SGC member,” Carter said. She turned her eyes back to the reports pulled up on her screen. “No mention of meeting anyone who seemed to be Alliance.”

                “Can’t they all just be tested like you were?” Rush asked Carter.

                “They could be, but the Trust generally goes for a different type of brainwashing than Colonel Telford suffered. Usually the person isn’t even aware of it. Whoever passed Rush and the Alliance’s information to the Trust probably doesn’t remember doing it, but if they feel threatened, they’ll lash out and often try to kill themselves.” Carter was looking straight ahead, voice clipped. Young remembered rushing down to the gateroom, while Hammond pulled the president away to safety, and Carter’s friend Martouf shot full of bullet holes, dead in her arms. He had been dead at her hand by the time the Secret Service had fired at him, Young thought.

                At least the friend he’d had to kill, he’d been able to save.

                “So if Athena and the Trust cell in charge of taking Ginn and I are all dead, then what will happen to the mole?” Rush asked. Young didn’t know.

                “There’s a risk whoever it is will just reach some deadline programmed into them, and just start shooting,” Carter said blankly. “I’ve never heard of a za’tarc sent to do anything but kill. The Trust may have simply gone for the same thing the Alliance did to David.”

                “Either way, they remain a risk,” Young concluded, looking over at Rush again. He looked deeply upset, face drawn into a frown and eyes cast down. “Carter, can you arrest them?”

                “They’d all need to be taken by surprise,” she said. “I don’t want a shootout.” She frowned at her computer screen. “SG-1 is scheduled to go offworld at seven a.m. All four of them should be in the briefing now.”

                “They shouldn’t go offworld,” Young said. Cam or Daniel, or SG-7. Cam or Daniel, or SG-7. David. He felt exhausted, his eyelids heavy and his brain swimming. His hip was killing him too. That courtesy of Kiva and David, and the fading bruises on Rush’s face thanks to another of his friends. He got to his feet. “Let’s go now.”

                Carter went into the gateroom control booth, saying something to Harriman, doing something to the computer. Young continued to the briefing room, Rush following behind him.

                “General Carter is making sure no one leaves,” he said, voice sharp and anxious. “Wait for others to come to confront them.”

                “I’m fine,” Young said. Between him, Vala, Teal’c, and Landry, neither Cam nor Daniel would be in good shape.

                SG-1 was coming out of the briefing room, Vala pulling her hat on over her low bun and Daniel pausing to say something to Landry in the doorway. Teal’c was enduring a good-natured elbow in the side from Cam. Everything looked as it always did.

                “Everett,” Cam said. “I’m surprised Lam isn’t keeping you close.”

                “She has her hands full with David,” he replied, as Rush fell in beside him and gave Cam a not-so-friendly look. He didn’t seem too upset over it, just nodded in response to Young.

                “You certainly did more to close the leak than we did,” he said ruefully. “I don’t know if I could have done that.”

                “Luckily Teal’c was there to make sure the rite worked,” Young responded. “But you could have, if it came down to it.” Cam folded his arms, moved his jaw. His eyes were faraway.

                “You came to see the gate again?” he asked after a moment. Young looked up at the dark silver structure, feeling the old sense of wonder, of hunger rise up in his heart. He saw Teal’c’s shadow move behind Cam; that was good.

                “You know, when I see it, it’s easy to remember how I got out of bed every morning eager to maybe die in flames,” Young said. Cam barked out a laugh. Rush gave him a look that was somewhere between dark amusement and worry.

                “Best job in the world,” Cam said.

                “Are you missing any memories from the past year, Cam? Any lost time?” As Cam stopped short, Young clamped his hand down over his sidearm. “Stay calm—“ That had been optimistic, because all of Cam’s considerable height and bulk were moving against him. His hand slipped off the gun at the same time that Cam pulled his entire weight against Young’s bad side.

                “What the hell?” Daniel was shouting, as Vala twigged to what was happening and swept his feet from under him. Teal’c got his arms around Cam from behind as Young tried to get up from the gateroom floor, adrenaline struggling against the renewed pain in his leg. His vision was spotting in and out, in streaky red and grey, and his impression of the gateroom was coming in as still frames: Cam writhing against Teal’c’s grip, Daniel and Vala grappling on the ground, Carter hauling Daniel back.

                _It’s Cam_ , Young wanted to yell, but he was still dizzy. Cam hadn’t spoken, hadn’t made a sound. That was a sign, he remembered. Carter needed to let go of Daniel and focus on Cam. He was upright again, and his vision was coming back more consistently. It had been maybe two or three seconds since Cam put him on the floor: Teal’c needed help. Cam was nearly as big as Teal’c and fighting with the unfeeling strength of the mindless. He turned towards them.

                Someone slammed into him from the side, a full body check with little weight but considerable force. Four gunshots went off; something warm spattered the side of his face.

                This time, adrenaline cleared his vision. Rush was standing next to him, one hand clutching his opposite arm. The sound of bullets impacting the gateroom wall and lights was still echoing, and Teal’c was breaking Cam’s gun arm. The gun clattered to the ground as Carter rushed forward to jam her fingers into Cam’s mouth, the other hand gripping his jaw. The alarms were going off now.

                “It’s Mitchell,” Young cried out, but Daniel and Vala were already rushing in.

                “You weren’t getting out of the way,” Rush said next to him, shaking his head like a dog with water in his ears. “God, it’s so loud.” Young looked to see a river of red pouring out from between his fingers.

                “Oh, shit,” he said, grabbing Rush just as he started to buckle. “Lift your arm, okay? All right, it’s fine if you can’t, I’ll do it in a second.” His jacket would do. “All right, apply pressure, Doctor. It’s not life-threatening.” He turned to yell toward the booth. “Call Dr. Lam, tell her gunshot wound to the arm!”

                Cam wasn’t thrashing around anymore, and Carter was stepping away. She must have brought a tranquilizer, or someone had got him with a zat. Rush was sitting down, determinedly applying pressure to his arm. Young managed to sit down next to him.

                “Are you in pain?” he asked.

                “I can’t tell,” Rush said, frowning. “I’m dizzy.”

                “That’s the shock and blood loss,” Young said. “You’ll be fine, just breathe evenly and stay awake. I’m going to raise your arm, that might hurt.” Rush turned grey and groaned when Young pulled his arm up and replaced Rush’s hand with his over the wound.

                “Cam’s secured,” Daniel’s voice was hoarse. “You want help to the infirmary? I’m sure someone’s on the way, though.”

                “I don’t think it’s good for him to walk or stand,” Young said.

                “I agree,” Rush said, voice a little absent. Young turned to look at Daniel: there was an abrasion on his cheek, and the shadows of bruises beginning on his neck.

                “I broke Vala’s nose,” he said, sitting down with them. “She really surprised me.”

                “She’ll forgive you,” Young said. “She has ammunition for a year now, she really should thank you.” Daniel gave him a small smile.

                “Is it the pain that makes you so funny?”

                “Yeah,” Young said, feeling his emotions swoop from relief to rage in a second. He forced himself to ignore it, and the pain and endorphins and adrenaline that were probably ravaging his mind. Rush was blinking slowly. “Yeah, that’s it.” He looked over to the gateroom entrance. “Where the _hell_ are the damn doctors?” Rush flinched at the yell, and Daniel got back to his feet in a second, snarling into his radio.

                The medics replaced Young’s jacket with a proper pad to staunch the bleeding, and laid Rush onto a stretcher to clean his arm.

                “It was through and through,” one of them said. “Someone’ll find the bloody bullet.”

                “Great,” Young growled, as they carried Rush away.

                “You should stay here until someone can come decide whether you need your leg immobilized,” Daniel said, shadowed by a sour-looking Vala holding a rag and icepack to her face.

                “You still have the healing device?” Young asked Vala.

                “Carolyn yelled at me a lot,” she said. “In hindsight, maybe I should have brought it down here. But you and Sam didn’t warn me.”

                “By the time we figured out it might be SG-1, you guys were already together,” Young explained, closing his eyes against a wave of pain as he moved his leg. “Wow, this is pretty bad.”

                “Yeah, Cam put you on the floor,” Daniel said dryly. “After you spent a few days straining it.”

                “Still not as bad as when it was brand new,” Young said, reaching out to Daniel, who frowned and took his hand reluctantly. Vala got on his good side, stooping to support his shoulder with hers. “Why is everyone on SG-1 so damn tall?”

                “It’s on the application,” Daniel said absently. “Let’s walk.”

                The trip to the elevator was not as excruciating as it would have been without Daniel and Vala holding him up: the pain was just the pain of movement and pressure and inflammation, not the pain of tearing.

                “Why was Cam reading Rush’s file?” Young asked, as they moved upward. He was leaning against the back of the elevator. “I mean, unless we were right about the Trust but there was another leak.”

                “We need another hard scientist on SG-1: if we move someone else onto the team, they’re probably coming from an important position.” Daniel rubbed his forehead. “Could have been me: I was reading the interviews Carter and everyone else did, I walk around like a target.”

                “Don’t worry about it,” Vala said thickly, voice a little nasal. Her accent and her come-down hair reminded Young briefly of Kiva, lying in her cell. “Two brainwashings in less than two days, there’s still time.”

                “That’s not funny,” Daniel said sharply. Vala’s brows drew together; for a moment Young thought he was going to be forced to endure one of their back-and-forth hate-flirting sessions where Vala was flippant and Daniel was angry.

                “If anyone gets to make jokes about brainwashing, it’s definitely us,” she said quietly. Daniel looked down.

                “Yeah,” he said, and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry about your nose.”

                “Yeah,” Vala replied, and leaned against his side for a moment. Young looked away, eager to get them all inside the infirmary.

                Someone gave him morphine and a bed and put his leg in a brace; Daniel was given an iodine bottle and a dirty look. Vala requested strong painkillers and received Tylenol instead, and Lam taped her nose.

                “Everett, I’m going to think you don’t take my orders seriously,” she said. “I want another X-ray soon. And you’re doing ice and heat packs, alternating, whenever I order it.”

                “How are SG-1?”

                Lam pressed her lips together. “Colonel Mitchell’s arm is set. General Carter has been given antibiotics. Teal’c is doing well. Actually, X-rays now.”

~

                After some time, during which Young managed to eat a few bites of sandwich, Rush, sans jacket and arm in a sling, came by and sat down next to his bed.

                “I’m in a bed and you’re not?” Young asked, looking around for Dr. Lam.

                “They stitched and disinfected it, it’s fine,” Rush said. “Just hurts a lot.”

                “Yeah,” Young said, fighting through the sudden crowding of things on his tongue. “Look, I’m sorry. You were in danger, I didn’t see it.” His heart was hammering through the haze of the morphine. Something thick was collecting in his throat and nose and eyes, making his jaw tight. He shut his eyes.

                “You were in danger. I was shot in the arm,” Rush said, voice slow and dry. Young opened his eyes to see Rush looking away, fingers on his right hand tapping his thigh. “There’s no need to fret about me.”

                “I—you were in danger because you walked down to the gateroom with me.”

                “I was in danger when the SGC started interviewing at Berkeley,” Rush replied. “You don’t get all the blame for this.” His mouth was set in a bitter little smile that Young was sure signaled real amusement at the situation. He would sometimes give the same smile when handing back papers: _this is a bad thing, but I’m right about everything_. Young was glad to see it.

                “Yeah,” Young sighed, closing his eyes again. “I think I have other arguments, but they gave me morphine.”

                “See you when you wake up,” Rush said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha, so I'm sorry about that 10 month gap there... grad school really takes it out of you as it turns out. Got all my Young/Rush feels back from listening to (believe it or not) the Asia cover of "Orchard of Mines." Check it out. Also more chapters are in the pipeline.


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